Another day, another case of fraud. Today, there's two!
The IrishChick in the Perth office - who I've never met in person, but have helped on the phone a few times - has been let go due to defrauding the company. Apparently she wasn't showing up at her sales meets, but was telling us she was. Again, my mad hacking skills (they're not) were called into play, and e-mail timestamps revealed everything. Silly girl!
The bigger story, however, is that a lot of sales (6 figures) have fallen through due to the customer "changing their mind". Of course, after the whole ChocolateStarfish fiasco, alarms bells were ringing - we've heard this song before! So, my awesome skills (seriously, its not hard) were summoned again, but this time, there were no incriminating emails - they must be learning!
After some more fishing around, we made the educated guess that our customers were getting a better deal from a rival company/installer - there was no other explantion that could fit the sales figures dropping so fast. We'd figured that someone (probably a disgruntled employee or rogue sales agent) is viewing our quotes and undercutting us - this kind of thing had happened before (~3 years ago), with a new employee starting at any of our offices, getting access to our database, doing some copy/pasting, then quitting. Obviously, this was just bad IT policy, so we had strengthed our contracts to deter people against this, restricted access for new people, etc. Still, something was very wrong, so I had to double check logs, logins, access times, etcetc. to see if anything bad was going down.
After about 2-3 days of checking and finding nothing, the truth comes out. Our sales manager had lied about the installs done this month, to inflate his sales figures. There was no foul play or dodgyness, just ego.
I want to cry myself to sleep.
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