The level of “insider” or employee fraud within Irish companies has surged, with many of those involved not being picked up in pre-employment vetting as they mostly have no previous convictions and are often highly educated.
The Irish Times has learned the number of insider or employee frauds increased by almost a third last year and the amount of money reported stolen in those crimes was close to €10 million, a fourfold increase on 2023.
However, Garda sources said the totals would climb as more companies realised sums of money were missing when audits and other checks were carried out, with such discoveries sometimes made several years later.
In a number of cases, gardaí have also uncovered evidence of employees, including those working for banks and credit card companies, harvesting sensitive data in their workplaces, such as account numbers.
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This has then been passed on to people they are in a relationship with, or living with, for the purposes of being used in frauds.
Some of those employees are privy to anti-fraud measures being taken by financial institutions and other businesses. That results in them constantly honing their tradecraft in a bid to avoid detection or being able to quickly engage in new tactics to beat the most up-to-date security measures.
Garda sources said this evolving tradecraft is aided by the fact the rogue employees often have specialist skills, having secured their positions because of their background in IT, for example.
Gardaí said that though awareness around insider fraud, especially in the financial sector, had increased, there was widespread acceptance in the Garda that many crimes were not being reported. And that means the real level of offending was much higher than the official trends suggested.
In at least one case, an IT worker in a bank deactivated the security measures on a large number of accounts, allowing for tens of thousands of euro to be stolen from them. Other cases have included people working for banks securing account login codes and other account details they maintained for supply to fraudsters.
In a number of cases, people were detected calling to the homes of bank account holders in bogus customer care visits after the victims had been sent scam texts and voice messages purporting to come from their financial institutions.
When the bogus home callers were identified and their backgrounds checked, it transpired they were actual employees of the banks but they were engaged in extra curricular frauds. They were using the knowledge they had gained from their jobs to both target the specific customers and also pass themselves off as genuine bank workers when they called to the properties.
Gardaí are treating most of the frauds as organised crime and in some cases, which have already reached the courts, suspects have been charged using legislation aimed at tackling gangland crime.
Funmi Abimbola (26), of Rosses Court Terrace, Lucan, Co Dublin, came to the attention of the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau when it investigated the theft of over €1m from a solicitor’s office in November 2020 in a fraud based on a bogus invoice. The former Bank of Ireland employee was jailed last October for three years for money laundering and assisting organised crime.
