A matter of Degree

 

You may not be aware that there is a factor of commonalty between the office of a consultant and a police station. People (other than the staff of your office) walking in are fundamentally weird. Some do not display weirdness from their appearance but the moment they open their mouth you wish you had never woken up from your cozy comfy bed that day.

It was a normal day as I was peering behind the newspaper since I did not have work to do after the lock down of the economy. It transpired that people did not want consultants to tell them how to survive since WHO was doing that seemingly free while vaccines were paid from your tax money. Therefore, when the receptionist announced visitors who were not my old clients, my heart starting doing a waltz though I had never learnt that dance myself. 

In walked a thin man ushering a fatter persons who seemed to be his boss. One was in western clothes while the other donned attire of a politician. As the politician looking person sat down without waiting for any polite permission, he interrogate me gruffly, “have you seen the news paper?” It was in my hand but it was 28 pages long. “I have yet to finish reading it but if you enlighten me on the topic it will help” I replied hoping it was nothing to do with sports which is not of interest to me.

“Now politicians will have to show their qualifications” he muttered in scared low tone. That sent me into peals of laughter as most (not all) have the dubious qualifications of a jail record or similar anti social related reputation. “We are consultants for business either to set up or to enhance their growth and are not in the educational field” I explained trying hard to think how I could convert this to my business opportunity.

“We think this will be the norm of the future and our generation does not want to be sidelined for a mere missing paper. As a strategist for my large political party I suggested printing fake degrees but that was shot down since high command held the press can validated it by phones and visits to the University.” The moment he declared himself to be a strategist I called my son on the intercom since he was a qualified strategist besides having more qualifications than me. Now let two bulls lock horns was my thought. “We never recommend illegal strategy” was the first declaration my son made. I sat back to watch real world drama that no TV network can ever show.

“How about linking with one of the smaller universities of the country from a remote corner?”  my son suggested. The politician remarked, “the smaller the university the more suspicious is the audience.” “Can we seek inspiration from the hidden funding modus” the accountant in me woke up. “Cayman Islands” my son’s face lit up like a eureka moment. The politician was puzzled. “Is it part of Andaman islands? If so, then good. No journalist or competing political party worker will get here as the locals are hostile to outsiders.” My heart sank as this man did not have even high school level knowledge in subject of geography. I shuddered to think of him heading a ministry needing knowledge of economics or mathematics. “Its far far away” pacified by son as if reading a fairy tale.

“We have the money to set up colleges in every state and our ministers will make each one of them deemed universities” he said with pride emphasizing that he had read published articles of my son on how to avoid failure of stat ups. “We could have suggested that as there are known universities with such low standards that post qualified persons are employed as security guards even to the satisfaction of candidates. Your investment in thousands of crores will be wasted immediately” opined my son. “Can’t we have a university we can hide from others yet permit them to verify authenticity of the degree?” asked the politician.

“Classic university question” I muttered only for my son to hear and he winked in acknowledgement that answer is in the question itself. When he opened his mouth to speak I gestured him to keep quiet while addressing the politician, “ I am sure you will give us our fees as you have lots of money but even there, what if I link our fees with the amount saved for you yet providing you with the solution?” The politician mentioned his budget as 1200 crores. Though I had no inkling of the capital expenditure without any survey, estimates of construction and manning such an Institutes  I nodded like a wise man muttering “Fair budget”. I quoted to him 5% of money saved to be our fees yet like any purchaser he bargained for 3%. I shocked him as I offered a self cut to mere 1% of amount saved. He beamed with pride knowing how his goodwill in the party will grow with such a cut throat negotiation. He grabbed his pen ready to sign at that very instant.

The Solution

Instead of Brick and mortar we set up an on line university with detailed subjects and hours attended etc. We introduced a call centre to answer any calls of verification of marks and student but no authority to give out location of the University. We named it Academy for Degree of Graduates (A DOG for short)  which was plain and simple. Even those in Jail could attend creating future politicians. Plus we made it into a money spinner with Degree for 1 crore Post graduate for 2 crores and PhD for 5 crores. Our politician was assured of his future income many times over.  In the rare case if any student wanted to study the course in earnest the graduation course had special subjects like ‘Strategies to break a political party’ a simple geography based subject like ‘Hotels locations to store party elected members’ so other parties do not snatch them. The subject of ‘PR of Politician’ would cover tactics to answer sting operation done by anybody.

Epilogue

In the mean time, I am off to buy a cash counting machine to verify if he gave me correctly 1% of 1200 crores saved.

 

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Disruptive Frauds

The title may be a misnomer. It is not to imply that there are some frauds that do not disrupt any work or any lives. All frauds create damage. In that sense they are disruptive at least after they are discovered. The title has reference to the phrase of ‘Disruptive Innovations’. This term is used when the innovation radically changes lives or style of living. Electricity is one such example where we were literally brought out of darkness. Today, disruptive innovations may not be so dramatic but they have a significant impact. Take the example of Agro Refrigeration by solar energy. The bargaining power of the farmer increases as his stock does not deteriorate during negotiation period. We are all aware of the condition of power supply in India is not too dependable. This is therefore an invention epoch making innovation.

Frauds are accepted to be application of intelligence in the wrong direction. Their inspiration also comes from constructive approaches. One such approach is ‘Disruptive’. The ‘Disruptive’ action may be cause or effect. All frauds disrupt work or even lives of companies after discovery. Therefore, there is not much insight gained in its discussion. ‘Disruptive Action’ as a cause is the objective of this article.

Call Centre Logic

The perpetuators of the fraud base their schemes on the ‘Call Centre Logic’. All of us have experienced some call centers at some time of our life. If you received a supportive response easily, your question was one of the predicted ones. The operators may be trained to respond to ten or even fifty questions from customers. The predicted answers will be ranked according to frequency with the aim to reduce duration of each call. Every Call center aims at low MPI (Minutes per incident). If you ask them any question other than the commonly expected one, they are stumped.  As human beings they will respond either by escalating the issue to their superiors or assure you of a response by email after study. But what if this was a computer?

Computers are not human. If you ask them to do anything they are not programmed for, then they cannot respond like humans. Let us say a menu has 8 options and you press 9. The programmer should have written a logic to display ‘error’ on the screen and keep the application stuck at the menu level. If this is not done then the application will just go down the menu and activate the first lines it encounters. This is too basic today. Programmers do not commit such errors today. But later sections of the applications too need such care and this is where the fraudsters gain.

Let us see a few cases starkly exploiting the aspect of disruption.

E-Wallet payment case

A recent news reported on fraud perpetuated by engineering students. E-wallet payments were done but the Bank ended up paying instead of the account holder. The newspaper did not report the detailed modus operandi either by design or lack of understanding. I summarize it to fall under the category of ‘disruptive fraud’. The perpetuators disrupted the transaction at some point after the payment was done. The application was not robust enough to ensure recall of who the paying person was. In such a case if half a payment transaction is done, the Bank ended up paying. 

Why did it appear only in this case and not when you are paying via credit card or any other wallet application? The answer is unfortunately simple. The Quality Control or QC did not do any tolerance testing or view it strictly from the security angle. If there is disruption at any point of time, the application needs to cancel the whole transaction and not just a part of it.

These are intentional disruptions. The perpetuators locate the points of disruption usually by accident. Network disruption, power outage are some of the accidental disruptions. Sometimes the applications are timed out if the transaction time crosses the threshold time. The timing out can also cause a disruption sometime as I have experienced it. But those are inconvenience and not frauds.

ATM disruption fraud

All of us have used ATM by now. The operations are simple. Insert card, remove card, enter PIN number, enter amount to be withdrawn, pick up the cash. Just four steps. Where can the disruption take place? At any place is the answer. But which point of disruption works, will be found only by trial and error, assuming the programmers had forgotten to install the controls. In one case the ATM user took time to pick up the cash. After the pre-determined time the cash was forfeited by the machine and the account holder got his automatic credit. He then wondered what would happen if he took part of the money.  Would he get part credit? He tried but got full credit. So daily, he withdrew the maximum permitted, let remain in ATM only one low denomination note and slowly pulled the rest. He got full credit despite. He discovered the disruption point. Programmers assumed either the cash it taken or not. No-one assumed part cash to be picked up. Now this account holder was (to coin a new phrase) laughing his way from the Bank and not to the Bank as the old phrase would be coined.

Prevention is only alternative

After detection, any moron can remedy the situation. The challenge is to forecast and prevent it. When the disruption is to be responded by a human being, there is some leeway. However, when a computer driven has to do it, the programmer better have planned for it. There are 2 philosophical steps to ensure this.

Step 1: Design for 120% of the situations without restricting to the brief of the client.

Step 2: Assume some person will want to challenge the application for its intelligence. Make sure the application does not jump to any routine unless it goes through the proper checks. 

Based on these philosophical steps of application design, robustness of application is bound to increase minimizing disruptive frauds.

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