I have spent more than two decades in digital forensics, and one truth keeps confronting me: fraudsters do not vanish into thin air. They leave trails, subtle, scattered, and often arrogant trails. The tragedy is that organisations rarely look in the right place, at the right time, with the right discipline. That is why so many cases in Uganda, from banks to insurance firms to government agencies, quietly die in boardrooms, not due to lack of evidence, but due to lack of proper forensic pursuit.
Let us walk through a real scenario. I will use generic descriptions to keep it professional. Visualise it as if I am taking you into a live investigation room.
The unusual transfer
It began with a single suspicious payment. An internal auditor noticed a strange mobile money transaction tagged to a procurement refund. The staff member responsible, let us call him Subject 1, a soft-spoken man in his early 30s, always in oversized shirts that made him look smaller than he was insisted it was an error. Errors do not repeat. And in this case, it was not the transaction, but the digital trail around it, that raised my eyebrows.
The device he used was logged into the system after office hours. The IP address did not match the organisation’s network. A VPN with free-tier characteristics was hiding the location. And the timing aligned perfectly with the moment the payment left the organisation’s account.
When you investigate long enough, you learn not to chase drama. You chase patterns. Drama is for television. In forensics, patterns tell the truth.
Where breadcrumbs start to speak
Fraud today is rarely analogous. Even cash-based fraud begins with a digital footprint. A password typed too fast. A login attempts from a phone the user “forgot.” A deleted message that was backed up somewhere else. Fraudsters underestimate the permanence of their own behaviour.
While following Subject 1’s activities, I noticed a second actor Subject 2, a tall woman with sharp features and a habit of wearing large headsets even when not listening to anything. She worked in customer support. And yet, somehow, her workstation had administrator-level access for a module she never used. That is not a red flag. That is a red billboard.
When organisations allow privilege creep where employees quietly accumulate system access, they should not have, you no longer require sophisticated hackers. You create them internally.
Following the trail deeper
We isolated three key breadcrumbs:
- The IP address mismatch
- The out-of-role system access
- Mobile money deposits repeatedly landing on a number linked to an unregistered sim card
When you see three digital anomalies within the same window of time, the odds of coincidence become statistically insulting. But instead of jumping to conclusions, a mature forensic investigator builds a hypothesis, tests it, and breaks it. I always tell boards: the worst investigators are the ones who rush to “the culprit.” The best ones rush to evidence.
We pulled the server logs, network metadata, and mobile phone records. Then we mapped every transaction over six months. This is where many organisations panic: the fear of what they might find. Truth is expensive. But ignorance is catastrophic.
How the scheme worked
Subject 1 initiated payments disguised as supplier refunds. Subject 2 escalated system privileges to approve them. The digital movement was subtle, small amounts, spread across different dates, routed through two mobile money accounts and a dormant bank account belonging to a distant acquaintance.
Here is the interesting part. The amounts were too small to trigger internal alarms but large enough to accumulate significantly over time. That is the new face of fraud in Uganda, slow, patient theft. It thrives in organisations where leadership only reacts to large explosions and ignores small smoke.
Most organisations believe fraud is caught by “strong controls.” I disagree. Controls only detect predictable fraud. It is behavioural analysis, cross-matching logs, and understanding human patterns that expose the real schemes. Technology does not commit fraud; human motive does. And motives echo loudly through digital behaviour.
Once we analysed login times, data entry patterns, device identifiers, and mobile money flows, the scheme became embarrassingly clear. You could predict the next attempted transfer before it happened.
In one of the logs, Subject 1 forgot to disable location sharing on his phone. That single oversight placed him at a small local restaurant at the exact moment the irregular approval was logged. Digital breadcrumbs do not lie. Human beings do.
What the board must understand
Digital forensics is not about recovering deleted files. It is about reconstructing truth. In this case, we mapped the fraud from origin to execution:
- Access escalation
- Transaction manipulation
- Digital concealment attempts
- Proceeds routing
- Withdrawal behaviour
When you show this trail to leaders, they often ask, “How did we miss this?” The honest answer is simple. It is because no one was looking for it. Ugandan firms still treat cybersecurity and digital forensics as IT support. Yet most fraud is authorised using legitimate credentials and insider access. This requires governance, not gadgets.
What else you should know
Digital forensics is not magic. It is meticulous discipline. If your organisation.
- does not centralise logs
- does not restrict privilege escalation
- does not segment networks
- does not review after-hours activity
…you are not running a secure enterprise. You are running a house without doors, hoping no one walks in.
When I train teams, I run a simple exercise. I ask them to check their personal email accounts and view their login history. Almost every time, someone discovers a login from a device or location they do not recognise. The real shock comes when they see how long that device has had access. The same shock awaits many organisations.
Fraud will evolve. Human beings will not. Greed will remain constant. But so will digital footprints. The only question is whether your organisation is disciplined enough to follow them. Digital breadcrumbs do not disappear. They simply wait for the right investigator. And in a world where every action, login, tap, keystroke, SMS, approval leaves a signature, the organisations that win are those that treat digital forensics as a strategic function, not an IT chore.
If you ignore the breadcrumbs, do not complain about the wolf that follows.
