When fraud fighters attend Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ (ACFE) Global Fraud Conferences, they immerse themselves in all-things fraud for a week, learning about the latest investigative techniques and tools and connecting and interacting with their fellow anti-fraud professionals through various networking events. In June 2025, more than 5,400 anti-fraud professionals from across the globe traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, or tuned in virtually for the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, where over 100 anti-fraud experts provided more than 90 educational sessions covering everything from fraud risk management, money laundering investigations, romance scams and nonprofit fraud to artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. Like every year, the conference ended with ACFE President John Gill’s interview with a fraudster, providing attendees with insight into why people commit fraud. This year, Gill interviewed Alex Jariv, who was convicted of a telemarketing scheme, and Richard Beasley, the former FBI agent who investigated Jariv’s case.
A defining feature of ACFE Global Fraud Conferences is the prominent keynote speakers who share their personal stories of fighting fraud and corruption. This year’s keynote speakers included World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; actress, comedian and podcaster Laci Mosley; Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist, Marina Walker Guevara; Government Accountability Project Legal Director Tom Devine; and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss. At first glance, it might not seem like these professionals have much in common with anti-fraud professionals, but through their keynote speeches they showed how the work that fraud examiners do every day to reduce fraud worldwide dovetails with so many other professions—and just how much they appreciate the important work of fighting fraud. Here are the highlights of their keynote speeches.
The effects of fraud and corruption reverberate through society, disrupting the proper functioning of government and diverting resources from citizens. As Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala impressed on attendees of the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, fraud and corruption corrode every level of society.
“Corruption is theft from the rest of society and from the future,” Okonjo-Iweala told the international audience of fraud fighters. “Stopping it isn’t just about stopping people from doing bad things or breaking the law. Fraud and corruption are also economic issues and development issues.”
According to Okonjo-Iweala, fraud and corruption are “socially corrosive.” They influence the minutest details of a person’s life and shape how they view their place in the world.
Corruption is theft from the rest of society and from the future. Stopping it isn’t just about stopping people from doing bad things or breaking the law. Fraud and corruption are also economic issues and development issues.
“Being shaken down for bribes by local police or government officials might be called petty — petty corruption in the academic literature — but it’s one of the most convincing ways to make ordinary people feel like the system is rigged against them.”
As director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and former two-term finance minister for Nigeria, Okonjo-Iweala has seen how fraud can hinder economic development. She also has a track record of fighting it. She’s the 2025 recipient of the Donald R. Cressey Award, the ACFE’s highest honor for a lifetime of achievement in detecting and deterring fraud.
As Nigeria’s finance minister, she pursued fraud, including ridding the government payroll of thousands of ghost employees. (Okonjo-Iweala served two separate terms as finance minister, first from 2003 to 2006, then from 2011 to 2015.)
“I’m proud to say that we tackled this effectively by tightening gaps in our controls.” She explained how biometrics were implemented to register each government civil servant into an integrated payroll and personal information system. According to Okonjo-Iweala, this removed 65,000 fictitious employees from the public payroll, saving taxpayers and the government “$1.1 billion in annual costs.”
Then there was the matter of oil subsidies. In Nigeria, the government subsidizes the cost of petrol (aka gas) at the pump. While this makes it cheaper for consumers, unscrupulous oil marketers were reaping the benefits by overstating how much fuel they were importing and pocketing the difference between the global market rate and the subsidized domestic price.
“During my first time in government from 2003 to 2006, this subsidy amounted to about $2 billion per year,” said Okonjo-Iweala. When she returned to government in 2011, the cost of subsidies had grown to $12 billion. After an audit, her team found $2.5 billion in fraudulent claims. “This was larger than the country’s [Nigeria’s] education budget.”
But not everyone appreciated her efforts. Okonjo-Iweala became a target of threats — people connected to oil marketers even kidnapped her mother and demanded that Okonjo-Iweala resign as finance minister. Thankfully, her mother was able to escape her captors, and Okonjo-Iweala remained in her post.
She also discussed the international reach of corruption. “Fraud and corruption can manifest in illicit financial flows that cross international borders,” she said. “Illicit financial flows across Africa are estimated at $90 billion a year.”
“There’s a supply-and-demand side to corruption, and when it comes to illicit financial flows, if Africa is the supply side, the demand side is those countries in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and elsewhere that receive these flows.”
According to Okonjo-Iweala, sound trade policies “can diminish opportunities for corruption. When tariffs are low, businesses have less incentive to lobby for or bribe their way to exemptions. When border processes are streamlined or digitized, customs agents have few opportunities to gain an edge in corrupt practices.”
She concluded her keynote with a message of encouragement for fraud fighters. “One needs constant vigilance. That’s why I’m so grateful for an association like yours with members who’ve devoted their professional lives to fighting corruption and fraud.”
(Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the subject of the cover story for the forthcoming September/October 2025 issue of Fraud Magazine.)
During her keynote to attendees of the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, actress, comedian, author and podcast host Laci Mosley explained how she turned her fascination with fraud into a successful media franchise. The host of the documentary series “Scam Goddess” (available to stream on Hulu) and author of the book, “Scam Goddess: Lessons from a Life of Cons, Grifts, and Schemes,” chatted with ACFE Vice President of Membership Ross Pry, CFE, during the keynote, infusing a bit of levity into the serious subject of fraud.
According to Mosley, in 2019 she set out to create a comedy podcast focused on current events, but the market was already saturated with them. Instead, she created a new genre with a comedic twist. Mosley calls it “true con,” and the Scam Goddess podcast became the genre’s flagship. As she told attendees, laughter is an ideal vehicle for educating her audience about fraud.
“I always say, ‘If you can make people laugh, you’re both agreeing that something’s true.’ So instead of preaching out a bunch of information, I get to communicate in a fun way where we all learn and walk away with something valuable,” she told attendees.
The cases that Mosley highlights on her shows are indeed educational and entertaining, with plenty of details about fraudsters, such as how they chose their targets, what they bought with their ill-gotten gains and other insights into their lives.
“The Scam Goddess” TV series follows Mosley as she confronts fraudsters and speaks with their victims. One guest who had a lasting impact on Mosley was Kathe Swanson, someone well-known to ACFE members. Swanson blew the whistle on Dixon, Illinois, city comptroller, Rita Crundwell, who embezzled $53.7 million from the city over the course of two decades. The ACFE honored Swanson with the Sentinel Award in 2018 for her heroism in exposing Crundwell’s crime.
“This woman [Swanson] was doing the job of 10 people in the city council while working with the FBI in secret for six months. It drove her to drink, and she missed one of her grandkids being born because she couldn’t get anyone to cover her at work. Rita really harmed her, and it really changed my perspective on fraud victims like Kathe,” she recalled.
While Mosley doesn’t make light of fraud victims and their experiences, she told attendees she has no problem lampooning fraudsters. She refers to them as “very unserious people” who “deserve to be made fun of.”
When Pry asked what she’d like to say to the attendees gathered at her session, Mosley shared a message of admiration and gratitude.
“What you do is so important, and I’m really excited that we’re all getting together and sharing information so that we can hopefully protect people from scams. This is really important work, and I really admire it,” she said.
(Mosley will be featured in the September/October 2025 issue of Fraud Magazine.)
Whistleblowing, says Tom Devine, isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s existed for as long as society has existed. Devine, the 2025 recipient of the ACFE’s Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award for whistleblowers, explained to attendees during his keynote address that while there’s always been people intent on breaking rules, there’s always been people to denounce them.
Devine listed some of the famous individuals throughout history who’ve spoken up, including Socrates, Jesus Christ and Galileo. All faced dire consequences for their bravery.
He calls whistleblowers “those people who use free speech rights to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust.”
Devine has spent his career working on behalf of whistleblowers. As legal director for the Government Accountability Project for more than four decades, he calls his mission, “getting the truth into the right hands.”
Devine’s organization was established in 1977 and inspired by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. The Pentagon Papers was a report commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967, which revealed the history of deception by multiple U.S. presidential administrations regarding the Vietnam War. Ellsberg faced intense retaliation from President Richard Nixon’s administration for his disclosure to the press, including espionage charges. A judge eventually dismissed the case, citing government misconduct. Today, the Government Accountability Project defends whistleblowers against retaliation and investigates their cases.
Devine attributes the practice of retaliating against whistleblowers to upbringing. As he explained to attendees, people are often raised to be good “team players” who cooperate and go along with the status quo. Nobody likes naysayers and “tattletales.”
But Devine said his clients are “patriots who couldn’t sleep at night” with the information — the truth — they had. “I think we all have a do-gooder gene. We like the world to be a better place because we were there.”
He explained that for many of his clients, if they didn’t speak out “it would be like a cancer eating up their soul, especially if something went wrong.”
Devine honored past whistleblower clients, including the corporate and field auditors who “exposed the truth about a nuclear powerplant in Cincinnati, Ohio, being built in systematic violation of almost every nuclear safety law in the book and was an accident waiting to happen.” Because of their efforts, construction was canceled. He also mentioned David Graham, a medical researcher with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who alerted the public that the painkiller Vioxx had caused thousands of fatal heart attacks. The FDA attempted to suppress Graham’s findings, but his disclosure prompted the drug’s manufacturer, Merck, to pull it from the market.
“In every one of those cases, they’re part of a broader legal campaign. But the foundation of all of them was a partnership,” Devine explained. He credited fraud examiners for their role in this partnership in “getting the evidence into the hands of the auditors, the accountants, the investigators, the inspectors, the compliance officers, and the people who cared about following the truth wherever it was going to lead them.”
Marina Walker Guevara opened her keynote session at the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference by drawing a connection between journalists and fraud examiners.
“There’s so much in common between your profession and my profession. Similar challenges, similar methodologies — and a similar level of obsessive personality,” she told attendees.
Walker Guevara, executive director of the Pulitzer Center, is the ACFE’s 2025 Guardian Award recipient for her work exposing fraud and white-collar crime. More than nine years ago, as deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), she managed hundreds of journalists who investigated the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers documents leaks. The investigations revealed the secret financial dealings of the wealthiest 1%, led to the resignations of politicians, and helped law enforcement trace fraudsters, drug dealers, and arms traffickers. In 2017, Walker Guevara and her cohorts won the Pulitzer Prize for their investigations into the Panama Papers documents.
“Collaboration has been a cornerstone of my career. It’s allowed me to cover stories that, in the newsroom, we’d say, ‘That’s impossible; that’s never going to happen’.”
To demonstrate how collaboration can make the impossible possible, Walker Guevara displayed a photo of a black hole and explained that seeing it would’ve been impossible without a telescope the size of earth until 200 scientists pointed their individual telescopes to the sky at once, capturing the image.
“When I think about this example, I think about journalism and how that ingenuity and that collaboration allowed us to go beyond our limitations, explore new frontiers and do the stories of public interest that the world really needs. That’s probably similar in your profession [fraud examination] right now.”
But collaboration wasn’t always the practice, she told attendees as an image of wolf appeared on the screen in the vast ballroom of Nashville’s Music City Center. “This is the lone wolf. This is us. This is the journalist; it’s part of our DNA,” she told attendees. “We have our documents. We have our data. We go to our caves and investigate and obsess and dig deep. And then we come out with our big scoop.”
Other professionals work together, such as law enforcement agencies that coordinate to catch criminals, and even criminals have their networks. “And journalists are working in isolation, chipping away at the same stories,” she said. “We need a network to fight a network.”
She calls this “radical sharing,” and when journalists share work, they share data, documents and expertise. “Local expertise is really important,” Walker Guevara explained to attendees. “Corruption is always local first, right?”
Technology is an essential piece of radical sharing. Without it, journalists wouldn’t have been able to investigate the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. “If we don’t have a technical infrastructure, we will succumb,” said Walker Guevara.
In 2015, German journalist Bastian Obermayer received an electronic file from an anonymous source known only as “John Doe.” Doe claimed the file contained internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, an obscure law firm in Panama that was a prolific provider of offshore financial services.
Obermayer and a colleague, Frederik Obermaier, turned to the ICIJ for help in digging through the files. Walker Guevara marshaled more than 370 reporters from nearly 80 countries to excavate them.
“This investigation was about a worldwide system of inequity and crime,” she told attendees. “Regular citizens were able to connect to, and finally understand, why the fact that someone has a [an offshore] structure in a tax haven, means they’re not paying taxes.”
In closing, Walker Guevara returned to the black hole scientists and addressed fraud examiners directly.
“You are the black hole scientists. You are the ones reaching for the impossible and trying to see what others are telling you is unseeable,” she said. “Let’s have a deeper conversation about the role that investigations can play in rebuilding our democratic society and how we might create a more equitable society.”
(Walker Guevara was featured in the May/June 2025 issue of Fraud Magazine.)
Negotiation expert Chris Voss shared some unconventional wisdom with fraud examiners during his keynote at the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator and current CEO of The Black Swan Group, told attendees that if you want someone to agree with you during a negotiation, to get them to say “yes,” then you need to make them feel comfortable enough to say “no.”
“In any given communication there’s a difference between hearing yes and saying it. And while hearing it might be wonderful,” said Voss, “I don’t try to get people to say ‘yes,’ because, when the phone rings and the voice on the other end of the phone says, ‘Have you got a few minutes to talk,’ what’s your gut reaction? It’s unease, right?”
Whether you’re trying to make a business deal, negotiating with family or friends, or conducting an admission-seeking interview with a fraud suspect, it’s great to hear people give their assent, but it doesn’t feel great for them to do it.
As Voss explained to attendees, hearing the words “have you got a few minutes to talk?” often strikes fear in people. It means they’re being asked to do something they might not want to do — and they might think they’re about to be scammed. “Because if somebody gets you to say yes, you’ve been flimflammed; you’ve been bamboozled.”
As long as you continue to genuinely show people you understand, you will always leave people willing to deal with you again
Voss is a 24-year veteran of the FBI and was the law enforcement agency’s lead international kidnapping negotiator and hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. As Voss recounted during his keynote, he had many years without a day off and carried two cell phones with him (one to make calls and the other to receive calls). He negotiated with kidnappers from the sidelines of his son’s football games. “On any given day, there’s anywhere from one to four Americans being held some place by a criminal or terrorist organization.”
Voss laced his keynote with examples from his personal life to demonstrate the fine art of getting a “yes.” He told attendees about getting a busy flight attendant taking drink orders to hang up his jacket. Voss explained that he acknowledged how busy she was, and the flight attendant agreed to take his coat for him. “What I did was preserve her right to veto,” Voss explained. “They stop and think, and they say, ‘No, no. I’ll do it right now.’ She doesn't know it, but she feels differently towards me because I went out of my way to preserve her time.”
Central to eliciting an affirmative response is empathizing with others to build rapport. Fraud examiners are well-acquainted with the concept of rapport and finding common ground with interviewees, but Voss cautioned that it’s not always a possibility. “The problem is that there isn’t always common ground.” He pointed out that as a hostage negotiator, finding common ground with a member of a terrorist organization would be absurd. After all, it’s not like he could say to an Al Quada member, “You from Iowa? You played Little League baseball as a kid?”
Like getting a “yes” while making someone feel safe to say “no,” Voss explained to attendees that building rapport also means making people feel comfortable. “Here's the problem with common ground. You feel great when you share it. But how does the other person feel?”
To demonstrate the difficulty with common ground, he recounted another airline experience. While flying from Washington D.C. to his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, the airline announced that it would be rerouting the connecting flight from Phoenix, Arizona, to Los Angeles. This change in plans meant that passengers would miss their flight home, and they’d be stuck in Los Angeles overnight. Voss recounts how one passenger was particularly irate and berating a customer service representative at the airport in Los Angeles. Voss attempted to soothe the fellow passenger with a little common ground. “I say, hey, man, none of us planned on being in L.A. tonight. We’re all in the same boat.” But the passenger wasn’t interested in Voss’s attempt at affinity. He responded to Voss with a blunt expletive.
Voss shared the experience of being stranded at the airport, but what the passenger needed in that moment wasn’t common ground. He needed empathy. Voss and The Black Swan Group call it “tactical empathy,” which is a strategy of focusing on understanding the person’s emotions and needs to build trust.
Voss tells the story of an FBI agent he coached through a negotiation with a kidnapper in the Philippines who’d taken a U.S. citizen hostage. The anecdote demonstrates the power of strategic empathy. Voss coached the negotiator to play to the kidnapper’s perspective, acknowledging the centuries of “economic harm” that he felt the U.S. had done to his country. In playing to his perspective, the negotiator was able to get the kidnapper to drop the demand for $10 million for the American captive, and eventually the citizen was released. “They threatened to behead him, and they let him walk away.”
A few weeks later, Voss talked to the negotiator who had an interesting update to share. The kidnapper had called him on the phone. As Voss explained, acknowledging the kidnapper’s concerns and showing empathy for his perspective endeared a criminal to a law enforcement agent. “As long as you continue to genuinely show people you understand, you will always leave people willing to deal with you again.”
Jennifer Liebman, CFE, is editor in chief of Fraud Magazine. Contact her at jliebman@ACFE.com.
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