It started with a number that would not sit still. A line on the bank statement did not match the ledger by a few hundred dollars, and the explanation offered was the kind every business owner has heard a hundred times: a timing difference, a posting error, a mistake that would sort itself out next […]

The vendor had been in the system for three years. Thirty one invoices. Professional looking letterhead. A phone number. A website basic, but functional. An address in a nearby industrial park. It did not exist. The company, the phone number, and the website had all been created by the same person who was approving the […]

The email arrived on a Thursday afternoon. No name. An anonymous account. Three attachments: a billing invoice, a subcontractor work order, and an internal project status report. The sender said only this: “These numbers don’t match. Someone should look.” We looked. What we found over the next four months was a government contract fraud scheme […]

They’d built the business over thirty one years. A regional distribution company, founded by the parents, later managed by two of their three adult children. The third child the youngest, the quiet one who’d always been better with numbers handled the books. For eleven years, she had handled the books. When the investigation was complete, […]

Healthcare fraud doesn’t always look like organized crime. Sometimes it starts in a small clinic, run by someone who has built a legitimate practice and then discovers that Medicare will pay claims that nobody is checking closely enough. That’s exactly how the scheme we’re examining today began and how it ran for years before federal […]

She hadn’t taken a vacation day in four years. Not a single one. She was first in and last out, covered for colleagues, refused to let anyone else handle her accounts. Management called her their best employee. Colleagues called her indispensable. She called it survival. Every day she wasn’t in the office was a day […]

Money that’s been stolen doesn’t disappear. It moves. That distinction sounds simple, but it’s the foundation of every asset tracing investigation we conduct. Fraudsters believe that if they move stolen funds fast enough, through enough layers, across enough corporate structures, the money becomes untraceable. In eleven days, we proved otherwise tracking $1.8 million through seven […]

Every CFO fraud case I’ve investigated has the same basic architecture: trusted position, unchecked access, and a window of time that closed far later than it should have. But this one had something that made it different from the start. After five years of methodical theft carefully structured, well concealed, successfully sustained through two external […]

Fraud at this scale doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t come with flashing red lights or an obvious break in the numbers. It hides inside ordinary transactions, processed by trusted people, approved through normal channels, filed and forgotten. What breaks it open is almost always small. In this case, it was a date. One invoice. One […]

In November 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the sentencing of Richard D. Zellner, the former CFO of a St. Louis County, Missouri company, to 41 months in federal prison for embezzling $2,062,051 from his employer. He was also ordered to repay the full amount. The scheme ran from January 2019 to January 2024 […]