White collar criminals hide in complexity and masses of untamed data. Investigating someone’s finances is a huge and messy ordeal. On big cases, entire teams of people will dedicate weeks if not months to go through bank and credit card statements line by line. Not only is it time-consuming, but it’s also expensive — and it’s why many financial crimes go unnoticed.
That's where Ocrolus comes in.
“We set out to create a system that would digitally analyze bank and credit card statements,” Victoria Meakin, President of Ocrolus said. “We do that with a combination of proprietary OCR transaction detection, data validation process and an algorithmic reconciliation.”
Ocrolus makes software that, with the press of a mouse key, allows investigators to conduct a thorough financial investigation in minutes. Their system organizes data from uploads of bank and credit card statements, making the data searchable and sortable and allowing investigators to quickly scan for things like high value transactions, recurring money transfers or other red flags.
Think about it like this: If you have to provide your significant other’s divorce attorney with your bank and credit card statements, you’d be wise to make them as incomprehensible as possible. Maybe you’d shuffle them up, and present them in a shoebox, your goal being to make it difficult for them to find the recurring charges you’ve been making at the Hilton on Thursday nights when you said you were busy working late.
The thing is, depending on how obvious the charges were, you'd have a pretty good chance at getting away with it. If you used different credit cards, or paid cash sometimes, it may be difficult to spot evidence of your naughty adventures among the haystack of other, legitimate expenditures. Chances are, your wife's attorney isn't going to dedicate the resources to do a thorough check anyway, and unless it's obvious in a spot check, you're off the hook on paying alimony.
If they’re using Ocrolus, however, you’re in trouble.
"PerfectAudit is an extremely valuable investigative tool for white collar fraud cases such as the Bernie Madoff Ponzi investigation, in which thousands of bank statements across multiple accounts and banks were reviewed by investigators,” Bruce Dubinsky, the testifying accounting expert hired by the criminal prosecutors in the Madoff Ponzi Scheme said. Dubinsky now serves as the Chairman of the Ocrolus Advisory Board.
Of course, it’s not just big-time Wall Street guys and philandering spouses who hide in the details.
“When we started reaching out to attorneys to get their reactions to the software,” Meakin said. “We quickly realized there was a much broader range of users.”
The company just emerged from beta in January of this year but has already found a wide variety of customers. It seems that everyone from divorce attorneys and police departments to federal agencies and Medicaid auditors would like a quicker way to turn financial information into searchable data.
“We literally keep finding new uses for this thing every week,” Meakin said. “There’s just a surprisingly large amount of paper out in the world.”
Image via Shutterstock.
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