Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to commit large-scale fraud at your company. Manipulating financial statements or inflating revenue to mislead investors would be difficult to pull off alone. You would likely need others to align stories, suppress dissent, and sustain the deception over time. And your colluders would likely be colleagues whom you’d come to trust after months or years of watercooler chats and after-work drinks.
“Most fraud is a team sport,” says Prof. John Barrios. We tend to think of teamwork as something that enhances productivity and innovation, he notes, “but you could also coordinate to heist a casino in Vegas. Coordination is a neutral technology. It can be used to build something or to conceal something.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of employees out of offices and into remote work, everyday interactions changed overnight….