System Forensics, Investigation, and Response, 3rd Edition

Fraud

Fraud is a broad category of crime that can encompass many different activities. Essentially, any attempt to gain financial reward through deception is fraud. Two major subclasses of fraud are as follows:

• Investment offers

• Data piracy

The following sections briefly examine these classes of computer fraud.

Investment Offers

Investment offers are neither new nor necessarily illegal. In fact, cold-calling is a legitimate sales technique when selling stocks. However, the process can be used to artificially and fraudulently inflate the value of a target stock. The most common version of this is called the “pump and dump.” In this scheme, the perpetrators buy significant amounts of stock in a company that is relatively cheap, often penny ...