Terms and Phrases Likely to Suggest Corporate Fraud: Part 1 – Email

In the deluge of emails, instant messages, and texts generated by employees in your organization each day, it can be difficult to spot fraud — unless you know what to look for. Today, we turn a wary eye toward email.

In 2013, we published a blog post listing the ten most commonly flagged email terms that suggest corporate fraud. Though that post continues to rank among our most popular, the five years since it was written have seen dramatic changes in how people and organizations communicate. In this two-part blog miniseries, we’ll shine a spotlight on new terms we’ve discovered as potentially dangerous in the half-decade since that original post.

These days, our list of keywords — compiled from multiple organizations currently utilizing the Smarsh Archiving Platform — most likely to be flagged for suspicion of fraud runs the gamut of communications platforms. First up, we look at email. In part two, we’ll examine social media and text messaging.
New terms likely to be flagged in email include:

• Send to my gmail
• Don’t leave a trail
• Call my cell/mobile
• Friendly payments
• Don’t text me
• Let’s take this offline
• TYOP (“tell you on the phone”)
• LDL (“let’s discuss later”)
• Message me on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn

Beyond email-specific flags, we’ve also compiled keywords and terms that should be flagged whenever they appear in official communications. These are valuable additions to your lexicon, regardless of how your organization communicates:

• Sounds bad
• Confidential information
• Delete this
• Tax haven
• Off-shore account
• Backdate
• Pull earnings forward
• Special fees
• No inspection
• Mitigate investment risk
• Guaranteed to be profitable
• No downside risk
• Borrow money
• Loan cash
• Loan me money

Of course, this is merely a brief snapshot of a few of the more common keywords, and is by no means a comprehensive list. For that, you’ll want to visit Smarsh Central, an intuitive, comprehensive knowledge base frequently updated with the unrivaled regulatory knowledge and experience of our team of experts. There you’ll find a running list of keywords, phrases, and exclusions used by actual Smarsh customers to identify and filter messages containing potential risks.

In all but the smallest organizations, manually searching for these terms would be impossible. Fortunately, Smarsh makes it easy with The Archiving Platform. With automated capture and management of messages across a wide variety of content types — including email, text, instant messages, social media, web, and more — and customizable, granular policies, flagging and reviewing messages is fast, simple, and consistent.

Crucially, it also won’t prove a drain on productivity. Our Supervision services include automated message assignment and escalation, issue-oriented, team-based review workflows that can be customized to your unique needs, and defensible, built-in audit trails, which simplify and streamline workflows for human supervisors. Finally, our Supervision Health Check gives your organization access to our team of policy experts who will carefully review and analyze your compliance efforts and offer insightful recommendations to help you further optimize your communications supervision program.

For more, please visit The Archiving Platform. And be sure to stay tuned to the Smarsh blog! The second part of this series is right around the corner, and you won’t want to miss our examination of potential red flags in social media and text message communications.