THESE ladies track evidence of fraud where it is concealed, and even retrieve similar stuff from a hard drive that has already been reformatted.
Mary Angeli Ablir, a 26-year-old certified fraud examiner, and her colleagues at Risk Factor Corp. Advisory Services Inc. investigate business fraud.
“When I was just starting, I was shocked at how huge they lose their money to fraud,” Ablir related.
She and her team probe cases that involve not only millions but billions of pesos.
But companies do not disclose the cases to protect their reputation, Ablir said, who was certified by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (Acfe).
Nothing about the case gets printed in newspapers and broadcast on television and radio, she said. She can only say that the victims are “mostly into manufacturing and distributing.” Some are banks, she added.
The value of contract to investigate starts from P300,000 to P10 million, depending on the extent of work and the objective of the company, said Ablir, who is also a certified public accountant (CPA).
A P10-million contract may take six months of work, she explained. The client may prefer to take administrative action or bring the issue to court.
Some victims take legal action, but the majority choose to not disclose it to the public to protect the reputation of the company, Ablir said.
Bound by nondisclosure agreement, she and her colleagues did not name any company.
Most evidence are retrieved from deleted data, Ablir said. The recovery of which follows a procedure “for the digital evidence to be admissible” in court.
Safeguards are required to preserve the value of evidence during retrieval and transfer, said Sherry Mae Jayme, 23, also a CPA. The original disk should be preserved, Jayme added.
Deleting a character from a particular word in the original disk and restoring it alters the hash value of data, Ablir said, added that such can be considered tampering evidence. The evidence becomes inadmissible in court as a result, she explained.
Despite having undergone formatting, evidence of fraud can be recovered from a formatted hard drive, which retains addresses that are like “black holes” afloat the disk.
“Through digital forensic we can recover deleted evidence bits by bits,” explained Sheyenne Almarvez, a 21-year-old information-technology graduate and certified ethical hacker.
Becoming part of a team that investigates fraud did not cross her mind way back when she was taking up accountancy, said 27-year-old Jean Rachell Vedana, also a CPA.
She says that with the technical skills she is equipped of today, she can do and see stuffs that most people cannot experience online.
One does not need to be good at numbers to train on and eventually conduct digital forensics, said Wendy Jane de la Cruz, 24, a CPA.
“It’s more on understanding and analysis,” Jayme said. Recovered bits of evidence are pieced together to establish lead.
These ladies learned digital forensics, other antifraud trainings, and cybersecurity on the job, and workshops conducted by private and government organizations.
As accountants, they are perfectly fit for fraud investigation. They enter a company undercover.
Everyone assumes they are just conducting an audit. Only the internal auditors of the company have knowledge that they are in to investigate fraud.
Ablir, Vedana, Jayme, de la Cruz, and Almarvez are also members of the Philippine Institute of Cyber Security Professionals (PICSPro), a group of patriotic cybersecurity practitioners and advocates.
Their association with PICSPro engages them in a campaign to arouse national cyberspace consciousness among Filipinos, especially the youth, and to secure it by adopting required measures.
As cybersecurity advocates, they seek the protection of the country’s critical industries, like banking, energy and power, which comprise may destabilize economy.
Image credits: Oliver Samson