Provest

“As one of the nation’s largest legal support services firms, ProVest provides service of process and related services to many of the country’s most notable law firms, financial institutions, and insurance companies (ProVest, 2012).” They provide services such as: service of process (making sure highly important documents get to their destination), skip trace (locating missing parties), loss mitigation, and fraud detection (ProVest, 2012). This sounds like the type of company that you could trust and depend on in your time of need; however, this is not the case. “Last Thursday night, an undercover deputy from the Hillsborough County, Fla. Sherriff’s office, acting on a tip, made a street buy. What makes this noteworthy is he didn’t buy drugs. Instead, he purchased 33 stolen names, birth dates and Social Security numbers (Novack, 2012).”

A man by the name of Joseph Burden, was immediately arrested and taken into custody. When questioned about these birthdates and SSNs he admitted that he got these from his employer, ProVest. ProVest goes on to say we, “takes data security and privacy seriously; numerous precautions are and have been in place to safely guard consumer data (Novack, 2012).” Companies are always subject to fraudulent activities within their business. Either someone from the outside is trying to breach their security and gain access to valuable information or there is an employee who already has access to this kind of information. These employees breach the system as well as their contracts for confidentiality.

Your average fraud perpetrator can be a mother or four or a college student in their second year, therefore Burden fit your “average fraud perpetrator.” Not a lot of information was given about his social life or family history, however, given the fact that he got up everyday to go to work I would say that he was a taxpaying citizens. Your average fraud perpetrator could be your average tax paying citizen, and in this case he was. This...