Corporate India’s unwillingness to see fraud as a strategic risk poses a grave threat to firms as they start experiencing frauds of the future indicates the KPMG India Fraud Survey 2012 launched in New Delhi.
Cybercrime, intellectual property fraud including counterfeiting and piracy, and identity theft were rated as the top fraud concerns for the future by survey respondents across all sectors. This underlines a shift in the fraud landscape with fraudsters increasingly targeting organizational knowledge (data, code etc) and not physical assets to defraud companies.
“Over the last decade knowledge has emerged as a key organizational asset. It is only natural that fraudsters will target these assets, as they are much more valuable to companies today,” said Rohit Mahajan, Partner and co-Head, Forensic Services, KPMG in India.
“The futuristic frauds identified rely on technology and allow fraudsters to work in groups to leverage their full might. Irrespective of size, sector and operations, every company was vulnerable,” said Mahajan.
In case of cybercrime, while over 80 percent respondents had policies on accessing external websites and social media from their office networks, 40 percent said their companies did not have specific guidelines on the kind of information that could be shared on social media. Around 53 percent of respondents said they had faced identity theft and yet did not have a policy to mitigate these incidences.
