Understanding How businss is done

Catelas Investigations software uncovered the key evidence in a fraction of the time of keyword based search tools

Background

A Dow 100 Industrial manufacturer, embroiled in an international fraud investigation, had collected 1 million messages from a number of offices throughout its business in Latin America.  As part of that process, these messages were reviewed by a leading New York law firm at a cost of $ 300,000.  The content was culled and reviewed but nothing damaging was discovered.

A key additional challenge was how to defensibly reduce the scope of the investigation & focus efforts.  The allegations potentially encompassed many of the offices across a number of countries in a region of Latin America.  Across each office & country, key executives, a number of the sales staff and finance personnel were potentially involved.

Complicating the matter further, a number of the executives were also potentially involved in vendor kickback schemes in addition to the fraud allegations.  It was because of these uncompetitive practices that an anonymous tip off was logged on the company’s Whistleblower hotline.

Solution

To support the effort, Catelas was deployed on the data that had already been collected and within 4 hours had uncovered 12 emails that were damning for the company.  The Catelas report that was generated, not only collated this key evidence, but also told a story of how the fraud & vendor kickback schemes works.

The report detailed how the parties were connected and visualized the strong trusted relationships that underpinned the network.  When displayed as a network, it became clear how the company did business – how sales, customers, finance, the vendors and the executives were connected.

Once the key network was isolated, it became easy to zoom in on the key conversations.  Conversations amongst these relationship groups were further mapped isolating the messages of interest.  In total, only 80 messages were read which included the 12 incriminating ones.  This compared starkly with the 1 million messages read by the law firm where no evidence had been uncovered.  The total cost $35,000.

Catelas Value

The case quoted here is typical of what we see when we compare the results gained using Relationship Forensics as compared with keyword based systems.  In keyword based systems you have to read a lot of messages – which takes most of the time.

In Catelas you have to read only a fraction of that number as the technology filters the content and guides the analyst to the highest risk and most interesting messages – automatically.  This not only saves a considerable amount of wasted time but also makes the investigation more effective.

Catelas is used across industries and across matters: – fraud, IP theft, insider trading, market manipulation, FCPA, conflicts of interest, 3rd party due diligence, kickbacks, insider threat analysis, conflict disputes, HR issues & more.  Bottom line, Catelas saves time, gets you ahead of the issue fast and ensures you avoids surprise downstream.

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