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The ACFCS is a worldwide organization for private and public sectors who work in financial crime discipline’s such as money laundering, fraud, data analytics, security, or even regulation/enforcement. Then, you have the CFCS, which is the only certification to respond to the needs for professionals with diverse skills and knowledge about financial crimes. I wouldn’t say there’s a huge difference due to the facts both of their goals is focusing on financial crimes within organizations. Financial crimes is when a individual or even a group is economically motivated to pose as a threat to companies, so this way they can improve their own stability.
When it comes to financial crimes though, it’s important to know your knowledge on them. The reason I say this is due to the impact it leaves on the victims. There’s different types of financial crimes like: counterfeit, money laundering, bribery, electronic information, and etc. So, in most cases, financial crimes would mainly involve just money, but in a scenario like identity theft I wouldn’t say it involves money. Even though, identity theft can lead to money fraud, most of the time criminals are using other identities to protect their own name. I would say financial crimes have changed over time due to the advancement of technology. As technology keeps progressing expect financial crimes to become difficult to investigate for law enforcement.
So, the problem with financial crimes these days is technology, especially the criminals who’re doing counterfeits. For example, I work at Target as loss prevention, and during COVID we were seeing a lot of counterfeits in our cash drawers. These criminals were using a advanced technology for these bills because Target has a machine where you scan the bills to determine if they’re fake or not. Technology plays a huge role in these financial crimes and it’s up to the government and loss prevention to come up with a strategy for these types of crimes. “As criminals shift towards digital currencies, regulators are also shifting their focus to custodian wallets, flat currencies, virtual assets, pre-paid cards, and the relevant KYC requirements for these areas. Newer systems that utilise machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are being used to detect transactional behaviour and analyse patterns in blockchain and cryptocurrency” (Patel, 2021). In the future, I can see criminals going this sort of direction, especially the criminals who operate within the Dark Web. Criminals who’re operating under the Dark Web already have a good idea on how to use cryptocurrency. So, these people who’re doing financial frauds start getting some sort of knowledge on this, then they could be a huge threat to society.
Technology has made it harder for law enforcement to investigate these crimes. The reason why is because these crimianls have their hands on these advanced technology that law enforcement may not have heard of yet. So, this gives criminals a opportunity to always be a few steps ahead of law enforcement. These investigations come down to how much money is the government going to invest into these financial crimes investigations. In my opinion, the more money they invest into that type of department, then the better chance they have at catching more of these criminals. Then, when you catch these criminals, there is a good chance you can get information out of them like how are they doing these financial fraud and who are they working for.
Even though, most people would say white collar and financial frauds are similar. I’m going to say there’s a little difference between the two categories. When I think of financial frauds, I think of criminals who have a negative impact to society. While, when it comes to white collar crimes, this is more of a organized crime where it involves illegal activities that’s not within the financial fraud category. Overall, this module had some material that I’m familiar with due to the fact that I’m currently enrolled in White Collar Analytics. The one thing I liked is how the question asked about if there’s similarities between white collar and financial fraud. The reason why is because I honestly never thought of that, but I can see why people would think they’re similar.
