Chapter 26
Ten Truly Strange Fraud Stories
In This Chapter
Seeing how creative some fraudsters can be
Watching these creative fraudsters get caught
Sometime during your career as an accountant or auditor, you’re bound to come across a truly unusual fraud — or at least hear a great fraud story. In this chapter, we tell you some of the wacky stories that we have come across over the years. If you have a wacky fraud story of your own, we’d love to hear it; e-mail us at frimette@brooklyn.cuny.edu.
Fraudsters can be caught because of good internal controls or good auditing. Sometimes they get caught just because the good guys get lucky. Sometimes they get lucky and don’t get caught at all. We hope you get a chuckle and a lesson from reading some of our stories.
The Paper behind the Wallpaper
An accountant friend of ours was called in by an attorney who specialized in white-collar criminals. The attorney had just finished working a plea deal for a client who was investigated for being a bookmaker. As part of the plea deal, the client agreed to pay about $5 million in back taxes on previously unreported income.
The client said he did not have $5 million handy and wanted our friend to work out a payout agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. Normally when working out a payout agreement, ...
