If you know people who shred documents with a cross-cut blade shredder while they watch TV – you might want to follow their lead. Those intelligent friends know that identity theft is America’s No. 1 crime among white collar criminals.
In fact, nine million Americans fall victim every year to identity theft. That is a staggering fact, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it can be far too easy for predators to make you their next victim. All they need is your name, your social security number or access to a credit card number. And you become another statistic. You can’t know where these criminals lurk. Some of them dumpster dive to gather old mail and paperwork. Others dupe you by misrepresenting themselves during a telephone call.
Here’s another possibility, though. Some criminals steal your identity while they are employed by your company. Can you imagine how angry that would make an employer? To suddenly discover credit card charges and lost bank accounts, all at the hands of a person they paid, in good faith, to be part of their team? It happens. And when they are an employee stealing from company employees’ private data, it’s still theft in the workplace. It may not be classified employee embezzlement, but an employee theft investigation is certainly appropriate.
learned of an employer’s situation after he had terminated his long time accountant for employee embezzlement. Charges had already been brought against the person, but he bonded out of jail within hours. Then he disappeared.
The fugitive recovery agent was frustrated and the employer was afraid that this individual might avoid prosecution. was asked to locate this person so the bail recovery agent could bring him back to face justice.
That scenario was bad enough. But then the employer discovered an entirely new nightmare. His personal savings account was drained. Credit card bills stacked up in his mailbox, all with his name on them. Falsified, of course.
When goes to work finding a missing person, their professional access to top-level data bases and their persistent investigators are like bloodhounds – trained on a scent and unrelenting.
Long hours were spent tracking the perpetrator’s moves through social media engineering, searching for clues. As it turned out, this individual’s shopping sprees left a paper trail. We located him in another state and the bail bond recovery agent was able to apprehend him. He was brought back in time to appear in court, right on schedule.
-Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations, All in Investigations
