Fighting Fraud

At the beginning of 2014 a memo was sent to the Xhire Mailing List group, saying that 2013 seemed to be the year that we have at last begun to win the war on fraud.  Within a week, a gang of highly organised criminals using a dormant company, Jacuzzi Films and a well known name within the industry had started to steal from companies in 4 countries, and total losses are close to £1 million.

The lesson  learned from this is that we can never afford to be complacent:  The more measures we bring in to prevent losses, the more criminals work to find ways to circumvent them.

For fraudsters, this industry is an attractive target:  The products we deal in are of high value and the risks seem to be low.

However, in the case of ‘Luke Biggins’ (A victim of identity theft) and Jacuzzi films, some basic investigation on the part of hire companies would have revealed that this was fraud:  For example, a whois lookup of the email domain that was used should have alerted companies that this was not legitimate.

Ultimately, a series of guidelines which are followed by the entire industry would be helpful in crime prevention, but in the meanwhile, please review the anti fraud suggestions which have been contributed by Xhire member companies, and our comprehensive anti fraud procedures page.

Comments are closed.