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Paragon has recently carried out a number of large scale theft investigations after separate companies noticed their goods for sale on Trade Me. One of the companies concerned regularly monitored this site; another company was informed by a concerned member of staff.

Both accounts had persons selling brand new goods, well below the normal retail price. The history details of the sellers revealed they had sold large numbers of goods, with one of the accounts for over 1 year.

Paragon New Zealand investigators carried out purchase buys from the sellers; strangely enough this revealed that the goods concerned should have been safely still sat in the companies warehouses. As neither of the sellers worked for the companies concerned, Paragon placed large orders with the sellers; this resulted in the dishonest members of staff being identified by surveillance teams, as they delivered the stolen goods to the homes of the Trade Me sellers.

One was a delivery truck driver, he had met the Trade Me Seller when he had earlier delivered a genuine delivery, and they had quickly devised their method of stealing from the company. He eventually admitted the theft of over 50 units of furniture, valued at over $150,000.

The other member of staff worked for the companies Marketing Department, she had been stealing goods from her employers for about 12 months, constantly booking out large amounts of stock for marketing related matters. Paragon New Zealand identified around 30 friends and associates whom she had supplied stolen goods, valued at around $50,000.

She came unstuck when one of these friends started on selling the goods on Trade Me.

Both members of staff were described as excellent employees and were very well trusted. Both of these thefts had gone undetected until the inquiries had commenced concerning the Trade Me accounts. It is strongly recommended that companies regularly monitor this site for their own goods being sold.

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Methamphetamine “meth” is considered to be one of the hardest drugs to quit. This dangerous drug is ravaging rural communities and spreading its poison to major metropolitan areas and across international borders at an alarming rate. What makes this drug so powerful, addictive, and destructive?

National Geographic correspondent Lisa Ling investigates the meth epidemic to uncover the menace meth poses to society and to find out why many are calling it the world's most dangerous drug.

This is a truly chilling documentary with similarities to the grip P has on many New Zealander’s.

Visit  http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/channel/blog/2006/10/explorer_drug.html for more information or Buy it from www.Amazon.com 

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We were asked to investigate an insurance claim relating to a burglary of a business premise. The claim was in excess of $100,000.

When we arrived to interview the insured he was elsewhere. A quick talk to a staffer located some goods still on a pallet.

We tracked down the insured and interviewed him. In his car were even more claimed goods.

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The old designation of "computer forensics" almost seems to be giving way to a newer and more relevant class of "media forensics."

We are being instructed to forensically examine numerous types of media today which though containing computer components,  often  appear nothing like a computer.  USB Sticks, Fax machine memory, Sim cards for mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s) etc. etc.

It is generally understood that Law Enforcement today just do not have the funding to research new and innovative Forensic tools.  Interestingly enough over the last year or so the main drivers of change in the area of our Computer Forensic tools has been the corporate sector as opposed to the traditional role played in this field by Law Enforcement. As evidence from computers  for corporate and institutions  increase on many levels, the amount of funding, to research new and faster tools for gathering  evidence,  has jumped quite markedly in the corporate sector. However as Forensic Investigators we must ensure that these new and innovative changes also keep pace with the evidential requirements of the courts.

The emerging perspective of Computer or Media Forensics  is that its purpose is to gather, manage and analyse evidence whether or not it will be used in a court of law. The real purpose could be an incident post mortem, an analysis of a particularly difficult technical problem on a company’s network, or the implementation of security and the subsequent analysis of the effectiveness of the implementation, to name just a few possibilities.

One would imagine that as we develop new and faster methods of examining computers that the interpretation  process would be faster as well. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Just a few years ago the majority of computers were  about 5 Gigabytes  Now we regularly examine computers up to  50 + Gigabytes and into  Terabytes,  the information contained in these files are immense. What would previously take a matter of hours to analyse can now take up to  a day  just to index and weeks to analyse. So the challenge now is to try and obtain crucial evidence as quickly as possible from the vast evidential resource that the computer affords us. Analysis and forensic tools often struggle to cope with the size of files today but work is currently underway on changing traditional tools to work in the new environment.

Watch this space…

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