A commonly quoted principle concerning fraud states: "there
is no such thing as a new fraud, only new ways of committing old
fraud." The advent of scanners, laser printers and desktop
publishing software has made the forging of documents and
signatures as simple as a few mouse clicks. However the underlying
fraud remains the same – forgery; and some of the less
sophisticated frauds such as forging cheque signatures are still as
popular as ever.
Technology has always been used by fraudsters to perpetrate
fraud. One of the first cases I ever worked on involved a cashier
falsifying the balance on a till roll by rolling the tape forward,
subtracting the amount he had stolen, then rolling the tape back
before printing the total for the day. The fraud went undetected
for months because management assumed (and why not) that the total
on the till roll was accurate. After all, it was a machine.
