Fraud Fighters: Don't Let December Turn Into Investigation Chaos
October 27th, 2026 | By: Stephanie Macrafic, CFE, Strategic Solutions Advisor
Key Summary
Year-end is the best time for fraud analysts and CFEs to close open investigations, clean up case documentation, and turn a year of casework into fraud trends leadership can act on. Report saves alongside losses, make sure every department's fraud metrics match, and use what you learned to identify next year's biggest fraud risks. Then lock in three to five January priorities with owners, deadlines, and time on the calendar so they get done.
Before the year disappears and January shows up with a fresh batch of alerts, cases, reports, and "Hey, can you pull that really quick?" requests, take some time to close the loop. I've been buried under that exact pile more Decembers than I'd like to admit, so here are 10 things every fraud analyst and Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) should do before year-end, plus a few lessons I learned the hard way.
I've lived through it in this seat, half your brain is planning for the holidays, and the other half knows there's a list of things that need attention before anyone can really check out. This is the checklist I wish someone had shoved into my hands earlier in my career, the one that turns "I'll deal with it after the new year" into an actual plan.
10 Things Every Fraud Analyst and CFE Should Do Before Year-End
1. Close Out Open Investigations
Review everything sitting in "pending," "follow-up," or "I swear I'm getting to that." A case that rolls into January isn't just a loose end, it's a case with a fading memory, a cooling trail, and a much harder path to resolution. It also quietly wrecks your year-end fraud trends and your total dollars left outstanding, so the numbers you hand to leadership look messier than they actually are. If something genuinely can't close yet, write down exactly why and what's still needed instead of just letting it float. Clean up what you can while you can. Future you will not thank you for punting it.
2. Update Your Case Documentation
Make sure someone looking at the file six months from now can understand what happened without needing to track you down and interview you. If you change roles, get promoted, or just forget the details (it happens to all of us), your documentation is the only version of the story anyone else will have. In my own seat, I had more than one law enforcement contact thank me for overly detailed case notes, and just as often, a teammate thanked me for the same thing when I was out of office and they had to pick up where I left off. Make your cases easy to hand off, even if you're the only one who ever expected to touch them again.
3. Run Your Year-End Fraud Trends
A year of casework is more than a stack of closed tickets. Pull your trends together and it becomes a story leadership can act on. Start with these questions:
Which fraud types increased, and which decreased?
What new schemes showed up out of nowhere, and which old schemes are cycling back?
Which products, channels, or account holder populations were targeted most?
4. Connect The Dots Between Cases
On their own, cases may look like isolated incidents. But when you line them up side by side, you'll start to see patterns that a busy investigator can't always spot when they're working one case at a time.
Look for repeat or similar:
Phone numbers
Emails
Addresses
Devices
Beneficiaries
Businesses
IP
Other commonalities
5. Look At Both Losses And Saves
Losses only tell half the story, and it’s usually the depressing half. Capture what your team prevented, recovered, or stopped, too.
Saves prove your program is working, and in my experience, they’re the numbers leadership remembers longest.
Track account holder losses and saves separately from the institution’s bottom line. Just because the FI didn’t take the financial hit doesn’t mean nothing happened. Every account holder who loses money is a reputational risk, and every account holder you help recover from a scam is a chance to earn loyalty and referrals instead of a closed account.
6. Make Sure Everyone’s Numbers Match
Fraud losses, prevented losses, recoveries, cases, alerts, referrals: make sure everyone is speaking the same data language before the year-end report lands on someone's desk. Nothing torches your credibility faster than two departments citing two different numbers for the exact same thing in the same meeting.
7. Identify Your Biggest Fraud Risks For Next Year
Start with what you already know: your own organization’s trends. Then layer in what you’re hearing from industry news and peers. Ask the question that matters most: if I were a fraudster studying our organization right now, where would I attack next? You’ll never think exactly like a criminal, because you’re not one (and I really hope you’re not). That’s fine. You don’t have to become one to spot the gap they’d go after.
Once you find it:
Use it to predict, and hopefully shrink, what’s coming next.
Brief your senior leadership team and board.
Next year’s fraud training is due for an update, so build what you learned into it.
8. Review Your Processes And Escalation Points
Year-end is the natural moment to fix the friction you’ve been quietly working around all year instead of dragging it into the next one. Start by looking at where cases stalled:
Where did investigators get stuck?
Which handoffs could nobody explain?
Where are the information silos everyone complains about but nobody fixes?
For each one, be honest about whether it’s a process gap or a training gap. They look identical from the outside but need completely different fixes.
9. Record the New Lessons Only Experience Can Teach
Document your investigative resources, unusual schemes, contacts, workflows, and the “things I only figured out after ten years” lessons that never made it into a manual. That knowledge is an asset. If it only lives in one person’s head, it’s also a liability waiting to happen the day that person is out sick, retires, or takes another job.
10. Create Your January Hit List Now
Don’t walk into the new year asking, “Wait, what were we supposed to fix again?” Pick three to five priorities based on what you learned this year, and give each one an owner and a deadline. Then block the time on everyone’s calendars now, before the “Hey, do you have a sec?” messages start. That’s the difference between a list you act on and one that’s forgotten by February.
A Bonus Reminder: Document Your Accomplishments
Document your own wins from this year: cases investigated, losses prevented or recovered, schemes identified, controls improved, trainings delivered, processes changed, recommendations made. Yes, actually write it down. Nobody else is tracking this for you.
“I fought fraud all year” is absolutely an accomplishment. But specifics tell a much stronger story, both to your leadership team and to your future self during review season. For example:
I investigated 285 fraud cases and connected 15 of them to a single check fraud ring, leading to two law enforcement referrals.
I prevented $400,000 in check fraud losses and helped an account holder recover another $85,000 from a scam.
After I trained 150 frontline employees on elder financial exploitation red flags, branch referrals to the fraud team increased 30%.
I redesigned our wire review process, cutting review time from two days to four hours.
I made three new impactful network connections that assisted in recovering $45,000.
Side note: if you hold a CFE, CAMS, or other certification, this is also your reminder to collect your CPE documentation and confirm you have all the credits you need. Don’t be the person scrambling for hours in March.
Frequently Asked Questions
Realistically, nobody has time to do all 10 before December 31st. Where should we start?
Items 1 and 2: close out investigations and update your documentation. Everything else can limp into early January if it has to. A stalled case or an undocumented file only gets harder to pick back up the longer you let it sit there staring at you.
Our metrics come from three different systems that refuse to talk to each other. How do we reconcile them?
Start by getting someone from each area, fraud, BSA, operations, whoever owns a piece of the number, to define exactly what they're counting. Nine times out of ten, reconciliation problems aren't math problems. They're definition problems dressed up as math problems.
Who should be involved in identifying next year's biggest risks?
More people than just fraud, for starters. Bring in BSA, IT or security, and the frontline staff who see account holder behavior every single day. The best risk predictions almost always come from the people closest to the data, not the people closest to the PowerPoint.
Fraud fighting is a long game, and the two weeks you spend closing things out in December are what make January survivable instead of miserable. Take the time now. Future you, the one drowning in fraud come January 2nd, will thank you for it.
Looking for a solution to have your back in the fight against fraud? Schedule a demo to see how RiskScout improves your team's efficiency and effectiveness.
Meet the Author:
Stephanie Macrafic, CFE, Strategic Solutions Advisor
With over a decade in financial services, Stephanie brings a rare blend of frontline experience and strategic insight to the team. She started her career as a bank teller, where she caught her first case of internal fraud, and has since worked her way up through retail banking, branch leadership, and contact center operations into enterprise risk, fraud prevention, and risk management leadership at a credit union. A Certified Fraud Examiner and industry speaker, Stephanie doesn't just spot red flags, she turns complex regulatory problems into practical solutions. She currently serves as Vice President of the Twin Cities Chapter of the ACFE.
