In today’s corporate world, fraud is everywhere.
For Rebecca Platsky ’12, MS ’13, creator and host of the “Corporate Gossip” podcast, which has over 200,000 total followers across social media, she found it at her job.
While working as a certified public accountant, Platsky discovered that one of the executives at her company had been named as a defendant in a high-profile trial investigating fraud. She sent a message on Slack — an internal communications platform — to her team at the time, calling this out with a link to an article with the executive’s name in the headline.
Platsky shared a screenshot of this message with a crowd of School of Management (SOM) students in the Anderson Center’s Osterhout Concert Theater on Oct. 7, to kick off the 37th annual Abraham J. Briloff Lecture Series on Accountability and Society. She was joined by her co-host, comedian Robby Slowik, turning the…
Identity theft is the “foundational” fraud upon which many other crimes are built. It involves the unauthorized acquisition and use of a person’s personal identifying information (PII), such as an ID number, Social Security number, or passport details.
- How it works: Fraudsters obtain PII through data breaches, mail theft, or “social engineering” (tricking people into revealing details). Once they have this data, they can open new bank accounts, apply for credit cards or loans, and even receive medical treatment under your name.
- Synthetic Identity Fraud: A sophisticated variation where criminals combine real and fabricated information to create a completely new, “synthetic” person. This is particularly difficult to detect because there is no single victim to report the suspicious activity initially.