Top Fraud Prevention and Anti-Money Laundering Strategies for Businesses.
As a trade and financial hub, Singapore is particularly susceptible to money laundering and other financial crimes due to large cross-border money flows. If your business is based in Singapore and has an online presence, you aren’t immune to scams and cybercriminals who are constantly working to steal data and money from unprotected organizations.
The best approach to safeguarding your business from these threats is to act proactively. Follow these anti-money laundering tips to keep fraudsters at bay:
Know Your Employees
The most complicated financial frauds originate from within a business. When an employee is unhappy with the boss (who may have insulted the employee) or feels a lack of appreciation from management, they might choose to commit fraud to take revenge. Suppose an employee who has been working for your company for 10 years is now expected to work more than 60 hours a week because some individuals were laid off. Moreover, the employee’s wife has lost her job too so the family’s financial situation is tight.
Staying aware of these details and paying close attention to any change in attitude should clue you into a potential risk. Listening to their issues should also reveal more clues. Oftentimes, it’s the employee you least expect that commits fraud. That’s why it’s imperative to know who’s working for you.
Avoid Clicking Online Links
As financial crimes proliferate, internet scams are getting increasingly sophisticated. Phishing emails of the past often arrived with obvious spelling and grammar mistakes and typos, making them easy to detect.
Today’s phishing emails contain no such gaps. You may not find any loopholes in them at all. Many of them include links, clicking on which can prove disastrous for your business. If you don’t wish to lose thousands of dollars, don’t ever click on those links. Instead, look up and call the sender’s customer service number and confirm the validity of the email.
Deploy Internal Controls
Simply put, internal controls are programs or plans devised and executed to strengthen the integrity of your financial records, safeguard your company’s assets, and deter and prevent theft and fraud. One effective strategy is to segregate the duties. For example, if you run a small retail store with a cash register employee, a manager, and a salesperson, make sure that the cash register employee only tallies the register receipts. The rest of the work of preparing deposit slips, and depositing funds to companies’ bank accounts is handled by other individuals.
Secure Your Internet Connection
The most secure approach is to use intranet, which is a private network used by a business that only shares computing resources and company information with the employees. This way, these aspects are no longer exposed to other entities on the internet. This is a great strategy for employee portals.
Conclusion
Just because you want to target global customers doesn’t mean all your business information should be exposed to the online world. This can easily make you a victim of financial crimes that are only increasing day by day. Following the aforementioned anti-money laundering tips should safeguard your business from most cybercrimes.
If you’re not sure how to establish internal controls, reach out to Intellinz, which works with Refinitiv World Check Intelligence and collects and checks proprietary data. Or if you would simply like to educate yourself on the intricacies of KYC Due Diligence feel free to drop us an email too!
