November Feature
*** SPECIAL ARTICLE ***
Hate your Job?
By Cynthia Hetherington, Cynthia_Hetherington at aon.com
It is no surprise, that some people are unhappy with their current work situation. For some it seems like a wonderful start to a long and successful career and before you know it, you are staring at the clock and counting down the days till payday.
These toxic individuals are counter-productive to your workplace environment, and what is more, they are ripe for committing offenses to the company like intellectual property theft or loss, insurance fraud, or embarrassing situations which fallout into reputational nightmares.
Whether you work in a Fortune 500 company as an analyst, or are working your way through college as a waitress, today’s employee is sharing their love and hate relationships openly through blogs and video.
Hello Youtube.com.
The amatuer video library, youtube.com, was purchased by Google.com. Wandering through the large amount of mostly silly material and inane content, I wondered how many of my clients had employees who posted material here.
Sure enough most of my retail clients had employees with tags listed on this service. Not every video was offensive, but a few were a bit over the top. One in particular demonstrated the lack of security a company is suffering by video taping a sleeping guard.
Perhaps more useful for investigators is to scan this service for insurance fraud cases. Why bother setting up a surveillance investigation, if you can capture your subject in a mock Shakira video? Yes, client’s long time disability collector, a former truck driver and the subject of a series of back surgeries, as a result of a slip and fall loading his freezer truck was caught on video tape. He was dressed in a long blonde wig and funny outfit dancing to “Hips Don’t Lie.” The video wasn’t as a result of expert surveillance, but actually a self video taken by a friend, as a gag to post on his website. Youtube.com picked it up and they were an overnight success.
That is until we picked up the video, based on the subjects user handle as a tag. It made our case quite easy, and has provided more than a few chuckles amongst the investigative staff.
The lesson learned is that when you get a subject’s email address, break off the first half (the portion that starts before the @ symbol) and run it through youtube.com. If they are posting themselves, or have tags (index words used by XML) associated to them, you should run across the content.
Other places you want to look for this user handle are in technorati.com, icerocket.com and myspace.com. You should also scan these services for your client names to see if any particularly new and alarming material has surfaced that they may be unaware of.
You never know what will pop up, but with video now joining the web in popularity, it’s sure to be an interesting and often entertaining search.
