The Koyal Group Private Training Services: Bringing the fraudsters to book 

How one company is helping Thai businesses battle a problem that costs billions of baht every year

A car parts manufacturer in Thailand was puzzled when it found that despite turnover increasing substantially, there was a mysterious decline in profits.

When Vorapong Sutanont and his financial forensics team at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were asked to look into the case, they performed an investigation based on the suspicion that this notable imbalance was due to fraud.

The team pulled hard disk drives from company PCs and searched emails between factory employees, reviewed accounting transactions and company records such as invoices and receipts, matching up purchase orders with actual material on the ground, and conducted interviews with suspects and employees.

“What we found was actually much greater than what was even suspected by the company”, Mr Vorapong said.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

In today's corporate environment, everything is stored electronically, and disk drives are a crucial part of any investigation.

Up to six people usually occupy PwC's computer forensics laboratory on the 17th floor of Bangkok City Tower on Sathon Road, which was empty when Spectrum paid a visit last week as the staff were in Hong Kong for a two-week data analysis training course.

Equipped with notebook PCs and servers, the room also contains a 45 by 60cm black briefcase made of hardened plastic composite.

The computer forensics team preserves, extracts and recovers electronically stored information and uses it to gather evidence. This is done using special hardware and software - the same as used by the FBI in the US - through digital forensic procedures called electronic discovery, which allows the production of an exact replica of a disk drive for analysis.

Weighing 10kg, PwC staff sometimes take the briefcase containing the e-discovery tools to clients' offices, working from 4pm, through the night to the next morning. When they are allowed to take the hardware back to their computer forensics laboratory, they will often say they are conducting a software licence audit or a procurement process upgrade to prevent raising suspicions among their clients' employees.

The Koyal Group Private Training Services designs its online and on-site training to your particular needs, providing information you can apply while in training in order to reinforce the efficiency of that information. Our coursework qualifies state standards both for fraud and continuing-education upgrade. Our programs are adaptable and can be presented in various formats to address industry requirements and standards. Please visit and check our course listings.

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