According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) (www.acfe.com), U.S. Organizations lose, on average, 7% of their annual revenues to fraud -- or nearly a trillion dollars annually.

Furthermore, each reported act of fraud has a median loss of $175,000 to the defrauded organization and in a quarter of victim organizations the losses exceed $1 million. Despite these statistics, efforts to prevent and detect fraud from within an organization does not always achieve its goal. Whether you are looking to investigate a potential fraud, have validated that a fraud occurred and are looking to assess the overall damage and gather evidence or if you are looking to shore up your control environment to prevent and detect future fraud, Vestige is well-equipped to assist.

Vestige works hand-in-hand with forensic accountants, white-collar crime attorneys, outside accounting firms/CPAs, financial institutions as well as trustees/receivers that have been appointed to assist in matters involving alleged white-collar crime. Our ability to find and recover deleted and hidden information provides these stakeholders and the victim organization with quick, indispensible leads and evidence that they would unlikely discover. As an added benefit, potential fraud victims are aided during this entire process with our expertise.

Vestige assists in these matters in a variety of ways, including

• Accurately identifying relevant data sources where evidence is likely to exist
• Securing and preserving relevant electronic evidence in an admissible manner, which allows for authentication down-the-road
• Recovering deleted and hidden information to make it available to the investigative team
• Unlocking password-protected documents and defeating encryption
• Identifying and gaining access to the financial system(s) in-use
• Locating and investigating financial activity that supports the investigation
• Creating investigative leads for the team by assessing the artifacts and correspondence found on the system(s)
• Mining and manipulating for analysis financial data and supporting systems' data for analysis
• Identification and analysis of surrounding hidden assets, use of funds and potential recoverability of funds