Ford on fraud

Joseph L. Ford, CFE, has spent a lifetime fighting fraud, working his way up from file clerk at the FBI to holding the bureau’s No. 3 spot. After leaving the FBI, he served as Bank of the West’s chief security officer and eventually founded his own consulting firm. Here Ford speaks of his experiences investigating both large and small frauds and what we can learn from them.

One of the earliest fraud investigations that former FBI agent Joseph L. Ford, CFE, took on at the bureau involved a vendor that submitted inflated invoices for parts being sold to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). By today’s standards the fraudsters’ methods might seem comical in their simplicity and surprisingly none-too-subtle ways in which they tried to cover their misdeeds. To extract more money from the government, the vendor used correction fluid to “white out” the amount owed, and then typed a higher number over the original one. This was the early 1980s, before the broad availability of desktop computers, and technology had yet to provide fraudsters with all the advantages it does today. But for a while it worked, allowing the vendor to garner tens of thousands of dollars in ill-gotten gains.