No matter what business you’re in, it can happen. Don’t get blindsided by fraud: Know when employees are likeliest to steal.
Do you wonder whether you could ever be the victim of employee fraud? Stop wondering – you could. “Something like three out of every 10 businesses will have employees who steal,” reports Janine Driver, author of You Can’t Lie to Me, who spent years training FBI, CIA, and ATF agents in how to spot dishonesty.
No matter what business you’re in it can happen, she says. “One dentist worked with the same assistant for 30 years,” she says. “Then her house was being foreclosed, so she forged his signature cosigning a loan.” The woman paid her loan and the fraud would have gone undetected – except that the bank sent the dentist a congratulatory note when it was paid off. “It’s not the homeless person out on the street stealing from us, but the person we trust,” Driver says.
In spite of her expertise, it’s even happened to her. With a busy speaking schedule, Driver had a management company handle her bookings, as well as invoicing and processing payments. One day, out of curiosity, she followed up a text from her bank acknowledging a deposit – and discovered that the payment had come from a booking several months earlier. Come to find out, the company had been withholding money, often depositing it long after the payment was received. “At the time, they owed me about $8,000, but they’d been borrowing and paying back for years,” she says. When she consulted an attorney about it, he told her she was the sixth fraud victim to contact him that month.
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