BFA #026 | Engineering Credibility

What's happening Fraud Fighters?

From an overlooked intern to a credible fraud fighter. I wish I could say it happened overnight and engineering credibility could happen with the snap of my fingers.

It’s probably not going to happen like that, but let’s lay out a roadmap to learn the nuanced art of credibility.

Ready for a shortcut that’s not a shortcut for a successful fraud career?

Let's investigate further.

Read Time: ~4.07 Minutes

I Had 0 Credibility

I sat at my desk as a low paid intern flipping through invoices to input into our system. Tapping away on my keyboard. Until I noticed something seemed off.

I dug a little deeper and looked up the account in our system. Noticing a few patterns and overlapping dates on these invoices.

I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew something wasn’t right. Didn’t even realize this was considered fraud at the time. Completely confused with what this could be, I raised my hand and asked a few questions to my boss. The case got quickly escalated and taken off my plate.

crickets

I never heard anything about this case again because I was just an intern. No credit. No good job. No thanks.

We had lost a large amount of money to this scheme.

How did this low-paid intern become the one to catch it.

Right then I realized 2 things.

• I was going to become a fraud fighter

• There was both an art and business to fighting fraud

Why did I never hear anything about this again?

I had zero credibility.

3 Levels of Credibility

A lot of people don’t want to take the time to learn the game. They’d much rather get to the part where people know who they are and start giving them instant approval.

Especially if the fraud fighter has already achieved some level of fraud fighting success elsewhere, they expect the very first thing they say or try to implement leadership and engineers jump to it.