Serious Fraud Investigation Office Looks to Trawl Social Media, Internet

To check white-collar crimes and catch fraudsters, the government's corporate fraud probe agency SFIO has decided to scan social media and various other Internet platforms with sophisticated software tools to gather evidence against individuals and companies under its scanner.

It will also deploy the latest software tools to analyse the banking transactions of the corporates and related entities which are under its investigation.

The SFIO is looking for a 'web crawler' tool that would work as its 'eyes and ears' on the social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google, the Corporate Affairs Ministry's public data on companies, news websites and other Internet forums.

The software, being procured through the National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT), would periodically query these platforms and the websites, extract content from them, and store them in an easily retrievable way to help during investigations.

SFIO (Serious Fraud Investigation Office) is a multi-disciplinary organisation under the Corporate Affairs Ministry and its mandate includes detection and prosecution in cases of white-collar crimes and other corporate frauds.

It has got experts from the fields of accountancy, forensic auditing, law, information technology, investigation, company law, capital market and taxation, among others.

The 'web crawler' software would help SFIO create simple visualisations using the extracted data and show the director relationships and corporate profiling, and also generate alerts for any suspicious information and activities, as per the tender document for these tools.

The 'Banking Transactions Data Analysis' software tool, on the other hand, would import the account statements received from various banks and would also cross-check the sum of transactions provided in banking statements.

It would also check for duplicate records and generate report of suspected duplicate transactions, while it would be able to search and filter the bank transactions as per the specified parameters.

Through this tool, SFIO is aiming to generate reports on money trails, accounts through which funds were transferred, mode of payments such as cheques, cash or online transfer, the quantum of funds transferred from the main account to either group accounts, related parties, directors or Key Management Personnel accounts.

It would also scan transactions routed to or from accounts of directors and their relatives, while identifying the high value transactions and the transactions pertaining to a particular entity.

The software would have a Business Intelligence capability to generate complex money trails reports based on business rules, as also a "fuzzy logic capability" of grouping various kinds of transactions into a single bucket.