Who we are:
The Culper Group is dedicated to training and equipping individuals and organizations with the tools they need to better navigate a world full of deception, duplicity, and fraud. Drawn from the National Security Establishment, in fields such as Intelligence and Psychological Operations, as well as the academic arenas of Behavioral Psychology and Neuroscience, our methodology incorporates field experience, theory, and cutting edge scientific findings.
Why it matters:
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of deception and misinformation in the world of deception detection. The driving human desire to avoid being deceived has given rise to a cottage industry based on pseudoscience and anecdotes, from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) to entirely unproven and unsubstantiated frameworks based on body language interpretation.
In the last several years, studies have shown that companies lost between 5% and 7% of their annual revenues due to fraud and deception. This means that in the US, on average, about 950 billion dollars were diverted from business’ financial holdings. A quarter of these cases resulted in a loss of a million dollars or more. The costs of deception tend to disproportionately affect small businesses, who account for 99% of America’s employers. Analysis suggests that small businesses lose on average $145,000 per year to fraudulent efforts that often continue for month after month.
That’s 950 billion dollars in direct fraud costs, not including the long term accrued costs of deception related organizational friction, such as false reassurances on project progress, misuse of company resources, and new hires who finagled their way into positions they’re not prepared for. That number also doesn’t consider the huge financial costs to individuals from schemes like Enron, Lehman, or Madoff.
Financial Analysts for investment banks, hedge funds, and pension funds, spend hours analyzing the financials of companies, looking for clues into the future performance of those organizations. There’s a wealth of technical data these analysts are trained to look for, but what are they missing? How did they miss Enron’s famous 2001 expletive-laden response to an investor inquiry? What did the more recent Encana earnings call with a similar response tell us, particularly as it immediately preceded a release of disappointing financials and a 6.6% decline in its stock? The answer is that they are missing the markers for deception and lack of disclosure our team can identify using sound scientifically defensible techniques utilized by Intelligence and National Security Establishment professionals to identify the lack of veracity in sources, and to analyze adversary disinformation and misinformation.