To succeed as a fraud analyst, you’ve got to be part Sherlock Holmes, part diplomat, and part Jedi. You’ve got to have a sharp mind and nerves of steel. When everything goes well, your company can win big. But when things go wrong…well, at least you’ll have a great story to tell!
We asked some fraud analysts to share funny, weird, or memorable things that happened while they were on the job. Think you can top these? Send your story our way! (Don’t worry, it’s anonymous.)
“At a gambling operator, we once had a case where someone was putting lots of deposits on their gambling account, without playing/betting a lot – usually a sign of money laundering. Turned out the person was getting divorced and using his gambling account to stash away money he didn’t want to be visible when it came to splitting up their estate as part of the divorce!”
“While working at my past employer I found an employee running his credit card through our system in order to acquire credit card points and extend personal loans. This was explicitly against our employee code of conduct and he was let go.”
“We built our own Console and our block button just said ‘STSD’ which stood for ‘Shut that shit down.’ It captured our feeling when stopping fraudsters, but it made for an awkward explanation when we got a new Head of Risk.”
“During seasonal times, the team often saw seasonal products created that run a high bill and take a long time until delivery during short seasonal period. In one particular case, we had a merchant sell expensive prom dresses. The racked up thousands in sales with a 1-2 month delivery window. Once the first orders started to arrive, customers emailed us that they had actually received small placement items instead of the dresses.
Since the orders were all considered shipped, the merchant was paid to their bank account for all of them. As soon as the first customers were refunded by the customer support team, the seller immediately removed their products and detached their bank account. The team ended up paying for all of the refunds and it was a heavy hit. It taught the very valuable lesson of proper feedback loop between departments.”
“We used rules to route things into manual review, so we often ended up with more than we could handle. Our team put up a picture of the Notorious B.I.G. on the wall with the lyrics to the chorus of ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’ because the more payments came in, the more we had to review.”
“Every now and then, we got cabin fever after doing several hours of review in our office — which at the time was a small, windowless room. We decided to start meowing as loudly as we could to see if anyone would check on us. Only one person did.”