Two bank executives in Dubai received nearly $2 million in bribes. In return, they approved over $500 million in credit facilities to a company that had no intention of repaying them. The fraud ran undetected for three years. The money? Gone.

That’s not a system failure. That’s inside help doing exactly what it was paid to do (not by the organization, of course).

Here’s how it works, the business model behind it, and the blind spots:

🧑‍💼 Privileged access becomes a weapon - Employees with legitimate access can override controls, suppress alerts, or fast-track approvals. One compromised insider can neutralize layers of expensive fraud controls in seconds.

📄 Clean paper, dirty deals - Fake claims, ghost beneficiaries, manipulated loan files - they pass audits when insiders help craft the documentation. In the Dubai case, false receipts showing supposed investments were submitted to the bank while the funds were quietly diverted elsewhere.

💰 Bribery beats hacking - Why break into a system when you can buy your way in? A well-placed bribe is often cheaper, quieter, and far more reliable than any technical attack.

🔁 Scalable fraud without scaling infrastructure - Once an insider is compromised, fraudsters reuse them. Same person, same loophole, different victims. Month after month. The 2024 ACFE Report found that nearly half (48%) of all fraud cases involved corruption - and corruption almost always requires an inside partner^[ref].

🕵️ Insiders know the exceptions - Policies define how things should work. Insiders know how things actually work, including shortcuts, workarounds, and “temporary” overrides that never get logged.

In a massive 2021 Saudi case, authorities uncovered SAR 11.5 billion ($3 billion+) transferred out of the Kingdom through a corruption ring involving 12 bank employees, seven businessmen, and a police officer. Bank employees helped open fake commercial entities, accept cash from unknown sources, and move money abroad - in exchange for bribes and gifts^[ref].

⚠️ Inside help doesn’t just enable fraud - it accelerates corruption. It undermines institutional trust, inflates losses, and makes fraud detection look ineffective when the real issue is human collusion. According to ACFE, the majority of occupational frauds involve either a lack of internal controls or the override of existing ones.

🛡️ What helps reduce the risk:

- Segregate duties in practice, not just in policy documentation

- Monitor behavior patterns - 84% of fraudsters display behavioral red flags before detection: living beyond means, unusually close vendor relationships, reluctance to take leave

- Rotate roles in sensitive positions and enforce mandatory leave - frauds dependent on continuous access often collapse when that access is interrupted

- Enable and protect whistleblowers - 43% of frauds are detected through tips, more than three times any other method

- Assume zero trust for privileged users and log everything - those with the most access require the most oversight