Case Study: Time-Series Analysis Conducted for Bank Fraud Investigation

A leading U. K. based bank suspected an employee of fraudulently lending money and then deleting emails to hide his actions.

Client Challenge

Consilio’s client, a leading UK-based law firm, required its client’s emails be processed and hosted in Relativity. The emails were collected from a single custodian as a part of a banking litigation claim involving a leading U.K. bank that suspected an employee of fraudulently lending money and then deleting emails to hide his actions.

Consilio Response

Consilio established that for a two-year period during which the alleged fraud took place, the custodian in question had email data spread across 24 monthly backup tapes. The solution was to process and analyze all emails across the relevant time-period, so Consilio’s SQL experts created custom fields in Relativity to enable searching, reporting, and analysis of when an email may have been deleted. By analyzing the data and identifying on which backup an email was last present, a pattern of deletion by the employee was identified.

Results Achieved

Consilio’s client suspected that emails were deleted shortly before the employee was asked to leave the company, but they were not aware that the employee had undertaken another deletion exercise earlier as well, which Consilio identified by showing a spike in the employee’s deletion activity. The client shifted the focus of review to only the emails that had been deleted within the two key periods, which provided a tactical advantage as well as a cost and time savings of 50%.