Lying for Money - How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World - Dan Davies

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ISBN: 978-1781259658
Verdict: 👍👍 

Financial fraud, a derivative of a financial crime, is an interesting topic - For someone who has spent quite a bit of time researching this topic from a regulatory and systems perspective ( transactional monitoring and pattern recognition) this book was on my reading list.

The book does not disappoint it is a nice read and I did enjoy it - although chapter 8 was a bit of  curve ball in the sense the author went all  biblical side in terms of crime - which did not interest me , but others may find it useful to read.




My highlighter did get used quite a bit and the following are just some of the bits I enjoyed seeing ;

  •  You can tell more about the structure of any industry by looking at patterns of payments than you can from any ‘five forces’ or SWOT analysis (p29)
  • People don’t check upon things which they believe to have been ‘signed off’. The threat is now inside the perimeter.   (p71/2) 
  •  Any lock made by a human can be picked by a human ( p200 )

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I think the best take away from the book can be found on p212 . ; 

  • There is a population of bad people out there, shaking around like the balls in a lottery machine. Every now and then , one of them will bump into your business , and they will try to do something dishonest . The question is will your control system detect it? Broadly speaking, the answer will depend on the proportion of transactions you check up on 

 


Location: London, UK

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