Spend enough time working in compliance and something starts to happen: you begin seeing red flags everywhere. The unusual transaction. The oddly worded email. The business that never seems to have any customers. The phone call asking for personal information. Sometimes that heightened risk awareness protects you. Sometimes it makes for a good story. And sometimes, apparently, it costs you money.
Below are some of our favorite stories from compliance professionals whose instincts followed them out of the office, starting with one from our own team.
Key Highlights
- An Alessa employee shut down what she thought was a scam call, only to learn it was a legitimate life insurance policy naming her as the beneficiary.
- Compliance professionals shared how their risk awareness shows up everywhere, from 1 a.m. card alerts to unofficial “site visits” at local businesses.
- One team was so well trained on phishing that employees flagged their own security training email.
- The habits that make compliance teams good at spotting suspicious activity can be hard to switch off after hours.
- “You Know You Work in Compliance When…” is a new Alessa series, and we want to hear your stories.
When Fraud Prevention Instincts Backfire at Home
Recently, an Alessa employee overheard her mom on the phone giving someone personal information. Naturally, her compliance instincts kicked in. She went into the room and asked the most important question she could think of: “Did you call them, or did they call you?”
“They called me,” her mother said. That was all she needed to hear. She immediately went into fraud-prevention mode and told her to hang up. Someone had called her and was asking for personal information? Clearly, this was a scam. By the book, she wasn’t wrong: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warns that unexpected callers asking for sensitive information are a hallmark of phone scams.
Except it wasn’t. It was a legitimate insurance company, and her mom was in the process of purchasing additional life insurance. And who was going to be the beneficiary of that additional policy? Her.
So there you have it. Finely tuned risk awareness officially cost this Alessa employee money. And apparently, she’s not alone.
Compliance Humor: When Your Job Follows You Home
After sharing this story on social media, we started hearing from other people in the compliance world about the ways their jobs have followed them into everyday life.
For example, you know you work in compliance when someone asks what you do for a living and, rather than spending 30 minutes explaining anti-money laundering (AML), you simply say: “Have you seen Ozark? We try to catch people like Jason Bateman.” Honestly, it may be the most efficient explanation of AML we’ve heard.
Then there are the compliance instincts that follow you home. One person told us about receiving a 1 a.m. “unusual activity” alert, only to discover that the suspicious person was a member of their own family secretly using the wrong card to buy their birthday present. Nothing says “surprise!” quite like accidentally triggering the family compliance officer.
Others have taken their professional curiosity into the real world. One compliance professional admitted to making a completely unnecessary site visit to a bakery in their city because something about the business had always seemed just a little off. No investigation required. No case assigned. Just a compliance professional who needed answers. In fairness, a business with steady revenue and no visible customers is a textbook red flag for cash-intensive businesses.
And sometimes that vigilance spreads to the whole team. One person told us their team was so well trained to spot suspicious emails that employees flagged their own security training email because it contained a spelling mistake. Misspellings have long been a classic sign of phishing, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Technically, you’d have to call that training a success.
When AML Red Flags Get Really Red
Of course, sometimes our risk awareness takes us a little further. One person shared that after being unable to reach their daughter for 30 minutes after her work shift, they called the local police and suggested she might have been taken by human traffickers. Was that the most likely explanation? Probably not. But when your professional life involves thinking about worst-case scenarios, apparently your brain doesn’t always clock out when you do.
And then there are those who realize, in hindsight, that they may have been making life interesting for compliance teams long before they ever worked in the field. One person admitted that when they were younger, they thought it was funny to put messages like “for the body disposal” or “mob payment” in the memo field when sending e-Transfers to friends. Years later, with a much better understanding of transaction monitoring, they had a new question: How many high-risk keyword alerts did I trigger? And how many analysts had to clear them as false positives? Somewhere, an analyst may still remember them.
How Working in Compliance Changes the Way You See Risk
Working in compliance teaches you to question things other people might overlook. That’s a good thing. But after years of looking for unusual activity, fraud indicators, suspicious behavior and potential risks, it can become surprisingly difficult to switch that part of your brain off.
A strange phone call isn’t just a strange phone call. A quiet bakery deserves further investigation. A late family member can suddenly become a worst-case scenario. And a surprise birthday present might look suspicious at 1 a.m.
That’s why we’re starting “You Know You Work in Compliance When…”, a series celebrating the funny, relatable and occasionally over-the-top ways working in compliance changes how we see the world. We want to hear yours.
Has working in compliance ever made you a little too risk aware? Did your compliance instincts lead you down the wrong path, create a funny misunderstanding or even cause you to miss out on something? Share your story with us. It might just appear in the next edition of “You Know You Work in Compliance When…”
