General news

As the COVID-19 vaccine rollout begins in Australia, we have been monitoring cases of vaccine program fraud across the globe to learn how fraudsters are taking advantage and how they have been stopped. Here’s a snapshot of the some of the scams we’ve seen.

Strengthen your counter fraud activities by exploring human decision-making and what impacts it.

Discover how the UK Government has rapidly deployed new data pilots to combat fraud against COVID-19 support measures. Learn about advancements in Australia, including the release of the Centre’s new ‘Data Pilot Leading Practice Guidance’.

Between January and June 2021, we are running tailored counter fraud narrative workshops to help individual Commonwealth entities craft their counter fraud narrative.

During International Fraud Awareness Week (15-20 November 2020), we ran five capability building webinars to help Commonwealth entities strengthen their counter fraud knowledge and expertise.

International Fraud Awareness Week is dedicated to raising awareness of fraud and working towards reducing its impacts. We are hosting a series of counter fraud talks for Australian Commonwealth officials.

Dr Russell G Smith is retiring as a Principal Criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology in November 2020. Throughout his career, he has been a strong supporter of the counter fraud community. We were lucky enough to ask him some questions about his career and plans for the future.

Mark Cheeseman from the UK Cabinet Office shares the lessons he learnt from fighting fraud during a global pandemic. He discusses having a structure for a fraud risk assessment, understanding the environment and acting with common purpose, having the fraud conversation and having it with integrity, post event reviews and getting money back, and breaking out of our silos and sharing.

Between November 2019 and March 2020, the Centre conducted the Fraud Capability Baseline Assessment Project to capture statistics on counter fraud capability across 19 Commonwealth programs and functions. The assessments also helped participants to understand more about their fraud risks and opportunities for capability building.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have been working tirelessly with its partners to protect Australia’s community. The AFP have two main Commonwealth fraud-related operations: Operation Ashiba and Operation Iris.