Fraud Eats Strategy

Workplace violence is the third-leading cause of death in the workplace in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 5,283 fatal workplace injuries that occurred in the United States in 2023, 740 fatalities were due to violent acts. Homicides (458) accounted for 61.9 percent of violent acts and 8.7 percent of all work-related fatalities. While it is not something anyon...

Brazil is a wild and wondrous country. The people are passionate, the celebrations spectacular and the history is rich. There’s a reason Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy. But investing and doing business in Brazil is fraught with rapidly changing, multi-faceted risks. Before 2014, there had been zero prosecutions under the country’s anti-bribery and corruption laws. Then the Lava Jato / O...

It is fair to say that whistleblowing across Latin America has caught on.  In fact, according to NAVEX’s 2025 Regional Whistleblowing & Incident Management Benchmark Report, a median of 2.97 out of each 100 employees submitted whistleblower reports last year. While that may not seem high, it is the highest region by far in NAVEX’s study when compared to the global median of 1.57 or the lowest of t...

So as we approach year end, many organizations are conducting performance evaluations and are allocating the bonus pool accordingly. And during the performance review process, low performers garner a lot of negative attention as you might expect. Indeed, one of the more widely recognized red flags in efforts to identify fraud risk is that of a disenfranchised employee, often a subset of the low pe...

I think for a lot of us, when we think about crypto, it still makes us cringe a little bit. And the question and the topic of today's episode is, should it still make us cringe? Whether you're a fan or you're shying away from it, the crypto ecosystem is expanding rapidly. Part of what is causing many to spurn crypto is due to reputational issues. These include the prevalence of crypto-themed fraud...

Mexico is a critically important trading partner with the U.S.  Together with China and Canada, the three account for 36.5% of all U.S. imports and 32.1% of all U.S. exports amounting to over $1 trillion of trade each year. And yet, Mexico is always a challenging country in which to do business. The gap became the wealthiest and the poorest is enormous.  Violent crime and gun violence is extremely...

In this special crossover episode, Scott Moritz, President of White Collar Forensic LLC and host of the Fraud Eats Strategy, and Scott Maberry, host of the Nota Bene, discuss important considerations in internal investigations and how integrating each into your process can improve efficiency and lead to better and more consistent results.

In March of 2025, Former Inspector General of the Department of the Interior Mark Lee Greenblatt and I discussed the firing of the Inspectors General and its far-reaching implications for the country. With the blizzard of Executive Orders, high profile government firings and other maneuvers that appear to continue to tear down government agencies, it would be easy to forget about firing of the IGs...

Petrobras, Braskem, Odebrecht, Stericycle and other U.S. style compliance and regulatory actions continue to be more commonplace across Latin America in the past decade. Indeed, there has been a tectonic shift in the implementation of leading industry compliance program overhauls following significant investigations and prosecutions. Some of those matters have included the use of legal tools such...

The world is a turbulent place in 2025 and doing business outside of the U.S. means needing to understand and to be able to react to a dynamic and evolving risk environment. The many countries and amazing people comprising Latin America are an important customer base and trading partner for most global organizations. Many global businesses have significant operations in the region and despite the...

On inauguration day, President Trump rescinded numerous Executive Orders from prior administrations including one in which appointees within each Executive Branch Agency was required to sign a pledge not to accept gifts from lobbyists, recuse themselves from matters related immediate former employers or clients for 2 years, and not to participate in any matter for which they lobbied the government...

Of the various fraud scheme names that have been coined over the years, “Pig Butchering” is one that provokes the most visceral response based on the name alone. And yet, the actual act of Pig Butchering is even more horrible than the name suggests. It is the latest variation of an age-old type of crime under the umbrella of “Romance Schemes”.  People who prey on the lonely and elderly pretending...

A discussion on China's state-sponsored theft of intellectual property from the U.S. and other leading economies with guest Frank Figliuzzi. Frank is a national security contributor and regular columnist for NBC News and MSNBC. He was the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the governmen...

Losses from a major financial crime can have a long term, negative impact on an organization.  The odds of recovering those losses are not great. In fact, many fraudsters embark on their criminal path because of the financial wreckage that is their personal lives. Divorces, job losses, health crises and addictions often cause otherwise decent, law-abiding people to lose their minds, become despera...

“It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”. Certainly, this quote, who depending on who you ask is attributable to Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln or Confucius, is a great way to encapsulate the importance of crisis communications.   We have all seen examples of how things can go from bad to worse when someone steps to the podium during a crisis that is u...

In this episode, we talk about remote witness interviews and how to make the best of a bad situation using time-tested interrogation techniques and other methods. While things are starting to return to something resembling normal, our use of video conferencing as a business tool is here to stay. I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about use of body language and other techniques to try to limit a...

Some human beings are wonderful. Some are middle of the road and some are truly terrible. Terrible human beings are frequently indistinguishable from wonderful ones. How can we tell them apart? In the context of business relationships, the tip of the compliance spear in attempting to separate the good from the bad is frequently open source intelligence investigations. Sometimes referred to as inve...

In this episode we going explore “bullet-proofing” your FCPA acquisition due diligence, merger integration and the government’s recent revisions to the FCPA Resource Guide and Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs guidance. Gone are the days when the potential bribery and corruption risk of an acquisition can afford to be something assessed at the 11th hour or not at all. Successor liability...

Successor liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a risk for companies since the statute was first enacted. But until recently, the DOJ and SEC have been deliberately vague in terms of the guidance offered and their expectations about FCPA due diligence and the time imperatives surrounding post-merger integration as it relates to combining compliance programs. That all changed i...

In this episode, we delve into the psychology of white-collar criminals. White-criminal criminals are often treated differently than other categories of criminals which provokes a response unlike other crimes. White-collar criminals are not better than or more deserving of leniency than other categories of criminal, it’s just that they are wired differently and understanding that fact can better p...

In this episode we have an ambition agenda. We are going to provide a high level overview of virtual currencies, blockchain technology and the vital role of crypto exchange, touch upon some spectacular failures in the crypto space, how the incidence of crypto crime is going down and the role that exchanges like Binance are playing in the mitigation of crypto crime.

The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and Violent Crime’s Apprehension Program (ViCAP) help coordinate cross border violent crime by assisting police departments with behavioral science profiling and by maintaining a massive law enforcement database on unsolved violent crimes largely serial murders.  Joining me today is former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi. In total, Frank served as a special...

Human trafficking is the fastest-growing transnational crime with more than 25 million people held in forced labor and sexual exploitation. As if these numbers aren't horrifying enough, 10 million of those trafficked people are children, and yet rarely are US organizations focused on human trafficking's impact on their operations, much less society as a whole. In fact, most of us consider human tr...

Host Scott Moritz was a guest speaker at the October NAVEX Next Virtual Conference joined by Gregory Coleman, a former FBI colleague, to discuss established investigation techniques and how some of these practices have changed in recent times. For more information visit: whitecollarforensic.com

In Part 2 of this series we continue the conversation of how to bring order to the chaos of the early days of an FCPA investigation. For more information visit whitecollarforensic.com