Charity

Small business owners often tell us that they use CleverControl as a psychological instrument rather than a practical monitoring tool. Employees know that their activity is tracked, so they treat their duties more responsibly and self-regulate their productivity. On their side, employers briefly check monitoring reports every few weeks simply to ensure everything goes well. They start digging deeper only when they have suspicions - and there are rarely any.

Today's case is of one of such small businesses. Andrew owns three bakeries across the town. As a cook and baker, he knows all ins and outs of his business, along with possible fraud schemes, so he is hard to hoax. His staff turnover is very low - most of his employees have worked for him for several years and prove trustworthy and efficient.

However, Andrew knows the saying "Trust but verify". He still tracks his staff using popular tools: video surveillance for bakeries and kitchens and CleverControl for his office employees: accountants, the sales and purchasing managers. He logs in to his CleverControl dashboard and briefly looks through the visited websites and messengers reports every two or three weeks. Usually, there is hardly anything to worry about, and Andrew does not consider an occasional funny cat video on Youtube a reason for a reprimand. "I know how numb the brain may feel after a day of working with numbers,- he says. - If it helps them to relax, I don't mind, unless they watch Youtube the whole day, of course. I am an avid animal lover myself; I donate 3% of my monthly profit to the local pet shelter."

At first, Andrew made these donations by himself, but later, he entrusted this task to his accountant Lisa. Gina, the supervisor of the pet shelter, appreciated these donations greatly.

Once Andrew happened to meet Gina. They had a conversation, and Gina expressed her regret that Andrew's business must not be not going well. Surprised, Andrew asked what made her believe so. To his confusion, he learned that his donations had been scarce over the past few months, and Gina thought he could not afford to support the shelter anymore. In truth, however, Andrew's business was on the rise, and the sum of donations grew in the bills his accountant brought him to sign every month.

Andrew examined the accountant's activity reports gathered by CleverControl. The donations were transferred on the first day of the month, so he studied screenshots, key logs, visited sites and screen recordings for those days for the last eight months. Screenshots and screen recordings showed that Lisa carried out fraud with donations. At first, she occasionally split the payments - the biggest part went to the shelter's account, but a hundred or two dollars to an unknown one. Growing bolder, she began transferring larger and larger shares of the sum and then entire monthly donations to the mysterious account. When CleverControl logged Lisa carelessly viewing her personal bank account from the office computer after a transfer, Andrew got the required proof. The mysterious account belonged to her. In total, the employee pocketed two months' worth of charity entirely and about 30% of other donation amounts over eight months.

Of course, Lisa was fired immediately. Andrew is going to sue her for fraud. He states that this case taught him to monitor his employees closely, however trustworthy they are. "Without CleverControl, I wouldn't reveal this scheme or have the evidence for the court,"- Andrew says.

• Screenshots

  This feature allowed detecting facts of money transfers to the unauthorized account.
• Screen recording

  Together with screenshots, it helped to prove the transaction to the employee's personal account.
• Keylogger

  The program logged the account numbers and the amounts of money transferred there.