One of my first experiences in fraud came from my childhood, I think I was about eight at the time. The school expected me to read something and asked me to get my mother to sign off on it. Somehow, I didn’t and in order to prevent any chance of punishment from school, I decided to forge Mum’s signature. School didn’t catch it – Mum did and instead of giving me a hiding, she managed to drill it into my head that my childhood misdemeanor had to land me in hot soup.
Little did I know then but I’d end up working in an
industry where I’d be dealing with financial hanky-panky in one form or
another. In crude terms, insolvency is about sinking ships and when the ship
starts to sink, the people, who often at the top of the ship start looking for
ways to siphon off the goodies. I think of the first investigation I was ever
asked to conduct, which involved a man who died in September and still had has
salary being paid in October and November (though the cheque for November was only
cashed in sometime in January of the following year.) I remember asking my boss
“Can a dead person draw a salary?”
This was just a small incident into the shenanigans that
people can get up to. It was small scale and since the person paying us to
investigate was the aunt, the matter was settled quietly.
However, this isn’t the only instance of people trying
to do something funny. Fraud, money laundering and the host financial crimes
are industries unto themselves and the crooks are not as simple as the case I encountered
during my first stint in the insolvency trade. Crooks as a rule of thumb, are
not stupid and they’re prone to using every available technology to ensure they
don’t get caught. Recreating a financial crime scene takes time and “getting
back the goods” is a laborious process. Here is an example of the “Asset
Recovery Frame Work” in Singapore.
One of the things that crooks are, is open minded. In a day and age where ordinary folks around the world are looking to shut the doors on globalization, the crooks are happily taking advantage of the transnational nature of money. I think of a recent seminar that I attended at Rajah & Tann, one of the largest law firms in Singapore, which conducted a seminar on the topic of asset recovery across borders in Asia. Here is the scenario that was presented:
It's easy to move money across borders these days. You
can do it at click of a button on your banking app. If you’re not too fond of
using technology, you can withdraw money in cash and then cross a border and deposit
it into account in another jurisdiction. The cost of moving money is negligible
and even if you did it the old-fashioned way, you’re still moving faster than the
“Good Guys.”
So, what can the good guys do? The first place will be
to acknowledge that the crooks are smart and the only way is to be smarter. Then,
there’s the realization that financial crime is borderless. The proceeds of a
crime in A will inevitably end up being disposed of in B, C and D.
Governments are working together and trying to get
judgements in one place recognized in another. Think of international police
organisations like “Interpol,” which works around the world.
Its also encouraging to see the private sector moving
in that direction too. In Singapore, the legal market has been opened up to
international firms. However, its encouraging to see that Singapore’s legal
firms aren’t sitting there defending their turf but expanding into others, thus
allowing lawyers from jurisdictions to pool knowledge and deal with cases that
are increasingly cross border in nature. Isolationism is not a luxury the “good
guys” can afford.
