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Forensic Accounting & Compliance
60 courses
Introduction to Forensic Accounting: What It Is and Why It Matters
The starting point for anyone curious about how financial fraud is found, proven and prevented, no accounting degree needed. Learn what a forensic accountant actually does and how that differs from a statutory audit, then see why the discipline moved to the centre of Indian markets through Satyam, IL&FS, DHFL and the bank fraud cases that followed. Understand the fraud triangle and the three families of occupational fraud, walk through the common ways numbers get manipulated, and get a first look at the forensic toolkit: tracing money and related parties, analytical tests like Benford's Law, evidence and interviews, and how to read a forensic audit report. Finish with a map of who polices fraud in India (SEBI, NFRA, SFIO, ED, RBI), the legal provisions that matter, the career paths and certifications open to you, and a ten-minute red flag check you can run on any listed company. Written for commerce and finance students, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to spot trouble before it shows up in the share price.
Understanding Common Types of Accounting Fraud
A field guide to how accounting fraud actually works, scheme by scheme. Start by drawing the line between honest error, aggressive accounting and fraud, and learn why every manipulation leaves a trail between profit and cash. Then work through the main families one at a time: fake and premature revenue, round-tripping, capitalised expenses, invented cash, cookie jar reserves, inflated inventory and receivables, hidden debt, related-party siphoning and promoter-level fund diversion, plus the inside jobs of skimming, billing schemes, payroll ghosts and kickbacks. Every scheme is tied to a real Indian case, from Satyam and DHFL to Fortis, Cox and Kings and Manpasand, and to the specific red flags it leaves in an annual report. Finish by matching fraud types to warning signs and diagnosing a scheme from the numbers alone. Written for commerce and finance students, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to recognise a fraud pattern before the market does.
Understanding Earnings Management vs Outright Fraud
Every reported profit is a set of judgement calls. This course maps the full spectrum, from conservative accounting through legitimate earnings management and aggressive choices to outright fraud, and shows exactly where the line is crossed. Learn the accrual levers Ind AS leaves in management's hands (provisions, useful lives, impairment, revenue timing), the real-activity games that change the business to hit a quarter, and the legal test that turns a choice into a crime under the Companies Act, SEBI's PFUTP Regulations and LODR. Then learn to tell them apart in the numbers: accrual quality, suspiciously small beats, estimate revisions in the notes and what auditors flag under SA 240. Built around Indian cases from bank NPA divergence to Satyam. Written for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and risk and compliance professionals.
Introduction to Whistleblower Mechanisms in Corporate Governance
Most corporate frauds are not caught by auditors or regulators. They are caught because someone on the inside spoke up. This course explains how whistleblower mechanisms work in Indian corporate governance, starting with why tips matter and the Indian cases where a single email or letter changed the course of events, from Satyam to Infosys and ICICI Bank. Learn exactly what the law requires: the vigil mechanism under Section 177 of the Companies Act, SEBI LODR rules for listed companies, SEBI's informant reward scheme for insider trading, auditor fraud reporting, and the public sector channels. Then see how a well-designed policy actually runs, from intake and protection against retaliation to investigation and audit committee oversight, why so many mechanisms exist only on paper, and how India compares with the US, UK and EU. Finish by learning to read whistleblower disclosures in annual reports and exchange filings, to judge how markets react to allegations, and to raise a concern safely yourself. Written for commerce and finance students, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to judge governance quality before it shows up in the share price.
Advanced AML Program Design for Financial Institutions
A concept course for chief compliance officers, senior forensic auditors and financial crime investigators who already know the basics of KYC and suspicious transaction reporting and now need to design the program itself. It treats an AML program as a system rather than a binder of policies: a risk assessment that drives every downstream decision, a governance model with clear accountability for the Designated Director and Principal Officer, customer due diligence that scales across digital onboarding, and a detection architecture of monitoring scenarios, screening and case management that is calibrated with data instead of vendor defaults. You work through the Indian architecture of the PMLA, the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules, FIU-IND and the RBI, SEBI and IRDAI requirements, what India's 2024 FATF mutual evaluation means for program design, and how to measure effectiveness, manage model risk, prepare for independent testing and learn from Indian enforcement actions. The course closes with the threats the next generation of programs must handle: mule account networks, virtual digital asset service providers and AI-driven monitoring.
- Diagnose why AML programs fail inspections even when every required policy exists
- Design an enterprise-wide ML and TF risk assessment and a customer risk rating model that actually drive controls
- Set clear accountability for the board, the Designated Director, the Principal Officer and the three lines of defence
Advanced Corporate Governance Failures: Board Level Complicity in Fraud
Most large Indian frauds were not hidden from the board. They were presented to it, minuted, and approved. This course studies board level failure as a spectrum, from passive oversight through wilful blindness to active collusion, and maps each stage to the liability tests in the Companies Act, 2013 and SEBI's LODR and PFUTP regulations. It works through Satyam, IL&FS, PMC Bank, Yes Bank, DHFL, ICICI Bank and Videocon, Fortis and Gensol Engineering from the boardroom's point of view, then builds the investigator's toolkit: forensic reading of board and committee minutes, director network mapping from MCA21 and exchange filings, resignation and auditor exit signals, and assembling a knowledge and consent evidence file. It closes with audit committee design and an escalation playbook for compliance officers when the board itself is the problem. Written for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Place a board's conduct on the complicity spectrum and match it to the legal liability test that applies
- Read the Satyam, IL&FS, PMC Bank, Yes Bank, DHFL, ICICI Videocon, Fortis and Gensol failures from inside the boardroom
- Analyse board and committee minutes, attendance and dissent records for evidence of knowledge or consent
Advanced Financial Statement Fraud Detection: Beneish M-Score and Altman Z-Score
A concept course on the Beneish M-Score and the Altman Z-Score for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators. Most practitioners can plug numbers into both formulas; far fewer can explain where the coefficients came from, why the cutoffs sit where they do, what error rates they carry, or why a company can pass one test and fail the other. This course goes underneath both models: Beneish's probit study of earnings manipulators, Altman's discriminant analysis of failed manufacturers, the economic story each variable tells, and how Ind AS and Schedule III reporting changes the inputs for NSE and BSE listed companies. You will then use the two scores together through a manipulation-distress matrix, see how fabricated profits push a Z-Score into the safe zone, work through Satyam and Ricoh India, learn where both models break (banks, NBFCs, holding companies, young companies) and how manipulators stay under the cutoffs, and finish by designing a screening and escalation programme whose evidence holds up before an audit committee.
- Explain how Beneish and Altman built their models, what each coefficient means and what the original studies did and did not prove
- Read every M-Score and Z-Score variable as an economic signal, not just a ratio
- Choose cutoffs and model variants deliberately, based on error costs and the type of company
Advanced Regulatory Investigation Processes: SFIO, ED, and CBI Roles Explained
A practitioner's guide to how financial crime is investigated in India. You learn the legal basis, powers and process of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office under the Companies Act 2013, the Directorate of Enforcement under PMLA, FEMA and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, and the Central Bureau of Investigation under the DSPE Act and the Prevention of Corruption Act. The course traces how a case reaches each agency, how predicate offences chain one agency's case into another's, and how SEBI, the Income Tax Department and the agencies run parallel proceedings on the same facts. Real Indian cases anchor every chapter: IL&FS, DHFL, ABG Shipyard, PNB and Nirav Modi, and Satyam. The course closes with a practitioner's playbook: responding to a summons or search, preserving documents, running an internal investigation alongside an agency probe, and making a forensic audit report stand up as evidence. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Map which agency investigates which offence and the statute that gives it power
- Explain how SFIO is assigned a case under Section 212 and what Section 447 fraud requires
- Follow an ED case from ECIR through attachment, adjudication, arrest and bail under PMLA
Advanced Techniques in Off Balance Sheet Fraud Detection
The most damaging Indian frauds of the last decade were not hidden in the revenue line. They sat outside the balance sheet: shell companies that were never consolidated, guarantees and letters of comfort that never reached the contingent liabilities note, supplier credit dressed up as trade payables, loans to promoter vehicles routed through inter-corporate deposits, and evergreening through structures built to look like investments. DHFL, IL&FS, Coffee Day, Fortis and the Essel group all ran through these channels. This advanced concept course is for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need to find what the financial statements deliberately leave out. It covers where Ind AS draws the consolidation and derecognition boundary and how that boundary is gamed, how to map a group's real perimeter using MCA21, AOC-1 and director networks, how to read guarantees, contingent liabilities and hidden debt in operating lines, how siphoning works through the periphery of a group, and how to prove it using implied interest tests, charge registers, credit rating rationales and network analysis, to an evidence standard that holds up under RBI and SEBI processes. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Why off balance sheet structures are the preferred hiding place for debt, losses and diverted cash in Indian promoter-led groups
- How Ind AS 110, Ind AS 109, Ind AS 116 and Ind AS 37 draw the accounting boundary, and the specific judgements fraudsters exploit to stay outside it
- How to map a group's true perimeter using MCA21 filings, Form AOC-1, director networks and shared addresses
Case Study: A Bank's STR Filing Process During a Suspicious Transaction Investigation
A narrative case study of how a suspicious transaction investigation actually unfolds inside an Indian bank. You follow a single current account at a fictional mid-sized private sector bank as three monitoring alerts fire, a cyber crime complaint lands on the same account, and the AML team has to decide what it is looking at. Watch the Level 1 analyst triage the alerts, the investigation team pull the statement apart and trace money through a network of linked accounts, enhanced due diligence test the customer's story against GST records and a site visit, and the relationship manager push back on commercial grounds. Then sit in on the Principal Officer's decision meeting, read the grounds of suspicion as written, and follow the filing to FIU-IND. The case closes with what happens after: restricting the account without tipping off the customer, law enforcement requests and freezes, an RBI inspection that tests the whole STR trail, and a post-mortem of what the bank did well and badly. The bank, customer, people and figures are fictional and for training only; the law, regulators and processes are real. Built for compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, risk and compliance professionals, and aspiring forensic auditors.
- Trace how an AML function is organised inside an Indian bank and who owns each step of an STR
- Read a customer onboarding file critically and spot what KYC captured and what it missed
- Follow alert triage and escalation the way a Level 1 analyst records it
Case Study: A Basic Introduction to the Punjab National Bank Fraud Case
A ground-up walkthrough of India's biggest banking fraud, the roughly 14,000 crore rupee Punjab National Bank scam uncovered in 2018. Meet the people involved, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and the PNB branch officials who enabled them, and understand the two banking tools at the centre of it, Letters of Undertaking and the SWIFT messaging system, and how they were misused for years without showing up in the bank's own core systems. Walk through how the fraud was finally discovered, what RBI, the CBI and the ED did afterwards, and what the case teaches about internal controls, reconciliation and compliance culture in Indian banking.
Case Study: A Cross Border Shell Company Network Investigation
An advanced case study that follows one cross-border shell company investigation from the first red flag to the enforcement fallout. A composite NSE-listed mid-cap reports a growth story that its cash flows do not support. An auditor's qualification and a bank's cross-border alert open the file. You scope the mandate, then map the domestic shell layer through MCA21 filings, common directors, shared addresses and related party transactions, and build the first network graph. You trace the money out through bank statements, SWIFT messages, import advances and an overseas subsidiary in a free zone, and back in as FDI and opaque FPI holdings that supported the share price. You then work the foreign layer: secrecy jurisdictions, nominee structures, open-source registry research abroad, and the official channels for evidence from other countries. The case closes with the forensic report, the split of threads between ED, SEBI, SFIO, DRI and the Income Tax Department, the fallout for the listed company and its investors, asset tracing, the control failures at banks, auditors and boards, and a reusable investigator's playbook. The company, its people and its numbers are an illustrative composite built from patterns in public Indian cases; the laws, systems and procedures are real.
- Scope a cross-border shell network investigation with a clear mandate, hypotheses and an evidence plan
- Map a domestic shell layer from MCA21 filings, director and address overlaps, and related party disclosures into a network graph
- Reconstruct outbound and inbound fund flows from bank statements, SWIFT messages, import advance records and overseas investment filings
Case Study: A Digital Payment Fraud Ring and How It Was Detected
A forensic case study of a digital payment fraud ring, reconstructed as a composite from the patterns in public Indian enforcement actions, I4C advisories and RBI and FIU-IND guidance. The ring ran a fake stock tips and trading app scheme: WhatsApp and Telegram groups, a fake institutional trading app showing paper profits, and a network of rented mule accounts that moved victims' money through UPI and IMPS layers to cash and crypto within hours. The course follows the money stage by stage, then switches sides and shows how it was caught: 1930 helpline complaints on the NCRP portal, a bank's transaction monitoring rules for velocity and pass-through behaviour, device and KYC linkages across unrelated accounts, and a network graph that tied victims to cash-out points. It then covers the response, from lien marking and account freezes to STRs, FIRs and victim refunds, and ends with the control failures that let the ring in and a reusable detection playbook for bank, NBFC and fintech compliance teams. All transaction figures are illustrative.
- Explain how a modern Indian investment scam ring is organised, recruited and financed
- Trace victim money through mule accounts, UPI and IMPS layers and cash-out channels
- Identify the complaint, transaction, device and KYC signals that expose a mule network
Case Study: Adani Group Stock Volatility and Governance Concerns
A ground up case study on the Adani Group Hindenburg episode, covering promoter holding, share pledging, related party transactions, short selling mechanics, circuit limits, index concentration risk, SEBI's investigation, and a practical governance checklist every Indian retail investor can run on screener.in.
- Trace the Adani Group's story before the Hindenburg report
- Understand the crash and the governance concerns it raised
- Apply these lessons to your own investing decisions
Case Study: Board Level Complicity in the Satyam Fraud Revisited
A forensic case study of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest IT services company, whose chairman confessed in January 2009 to a balance sheet inflated by more than ₹7,000 crore, most of it cash that did not exist. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators, it revisits the fraud through the record that emerged after 2009: the CBI chargesheets and the 2015 special court judgment, SEBI's orders, the SFIO findings and the SEC and PCAOB actions against the auditors. The focus is the board. You examine how a board of globally credentialed independent directors approved the Maytas related party acquisition in December 2008, what the audit committee did and did not ask about years of idle cash, how the statutory auditor relied on bank confirmations routed through management, and where the line runs between complicity, negligence and capture. The course traces the aftermath from government supersession and the Tech Mahindra rescue to the Companies Act 2013 reforms it triggered, and closes with a board complicity diagnostic you can apply to any listed Indian company using exchange filings, annual reports and Screener.in.
- Reconstruct how the Satyam fraud worked, from fabricated bank statements and fixed deposit receipts to fake invoices generated outside the normal billing system
- Analyse the 16 December 2008 Maytas board meeting and identify the questions independent directors failed to ask about a related party deal
- Distinguish complicity, negligence and capture when assessing the conduct of independent directors, the audit committee and the statutory auditor
Corporate Governance: Evaluating Management Quality
A practical course on judging the people running the companies you own. Learn to read promoter holding and pledges, board and auditor disclosures, related party transactions, capital allocation records, and SEBI and exchange filings for Indian listed companies, then turn it all into a repeatable governance scorecard using annual reports, BSE/NSE filings, and screener.in.
- Why governance quality drives long-term returns and valuation multiples in Indian markets
- How to read promoter holding, pledged shares, and group structures for warning signs
- How to evaluate board independence, auditor remarks, and managerial remuneration
Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags
A forensic course for investors who already read financial statements and now want to catch the ones that lie. Learn how Indian listed companies inflate revenue, hide expenses, fake cash, and dress up balance sheets, and how to detect it using annual report notes, auditor reports, BSE/NSE filings, screener.in data, and quantitative screens like the Beneish M-Score. Built on real Indian cases: Satyam, Manpasand Beverages, Brightcom, Gitanjali Gems, CG Power, DHFL, Ricoh India, and more.
- Why companies commit accounting fraud and where the pressure points sit in Indian promoter-led firms
- How revenue gets inflated through channel stuffing, round-tripping, and fake customers, and how to test it against receivables and cash
- How expenses get parked in the balance sheet through capitalisation, inventory games, and related party structures
Introduction to Anti Money Laundering (AML): Concepts and Terminology
A ground-up introduction to anti money laundering for Indian students, investors and anyone considering a compliance career. Learn what money laundering actually is, the three stages of placement, layering and integration, and the predicate offences that generate dirty money in the first place. Walk through the common laundering methods seen in India, from cash structuring and benami accounts to shell companies, trade-based laundering, hawala and crypto. Then map India's AML framework: the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, the roles of FIU-IND, the Enforcement Directorate, RBI, SEBI and IRDAI, and how FATF shapes it all. Finally, master the core terminology, KYC, CDD, EDD, beneficial ownership, PEPs, STRs and CTRs, red flags and transaction monitoring, and see how it all shows up in practice at your broker, your bank and in real Indian enforcement cases.
- Explain what money laundering is and walk through placement, layering and integration with Indian examples
- Recognise the common laundering methods, from structuring and money mules to shell companies, trade-based laundering and hawala
- Describe the PMLA 2002 and the roles of FIU-IND, the Enforcement Directorate, RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and FATF
Introduction to Forensic Audit Methodology
A concept course on the method behind a forensic audit: what makes it different from a statutory or internal audit, who commissions one in India and why, and the standards that govern the work. You will follow the full lifecycle, from predication and scoping to hypothesis-led planning, evidence gathering, analytics, interviews, fund flow tracing, loss quantification and the final report. Along the way you will learn how evidence must be handled to stand up under the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, where ICAI's Forensic Accounting and Investigation Standards fit, what reporting duties arise under Section 143(12) of the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and the RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management, and what Indian courts have said about forensic audit reports. Built for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals in risk and compliance roles. Pair it with the practice drills course on conducting a basic forensic audit walkthrough to apply each step.
- Distinguish a forensic audit from statutory audit, internal audit and a regulatory investigation
- Explain who commissions forensic audits in India, including lenders, SEBI, boards and insolvency professionals
- Move from predication to a scoped engagement and a hypothesis-led work plan
Introduction to KYC: Know Your Customer Frameworks
A concept-first introduction to Know Your Customer, the process that sits in front of every bank account, demat account, mutual fund folio and insurance policy in India. You start with the problem KYC was built to solve: money laundering, terror financing and fraud that depend on accounts nobody can trace to a real person. You then learn the legal backbone (the Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002 and the PML Rules), who writes the detailed rules (RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, PFRDA and FIU-IND) and how the global FATF standards shape them. The middle of the course covers the building blocks every KYC framework shares: customer identification with PAN, Officially Valid Documents and Aadhaar, the three levels of due diligence, beneficial ownership and risk categorisation. You then see India's KYC infrastructure in action: the CKYC registry, KYC Registration Agencies, eKYC, Video KYC and periodic updation. The course closes with how KYC differs across a bank, a stockbroker such as Zerodha and an insurer, what Indian enforcement actions reveal when KYC fails, and what KYC means for you as an investor or a future compliance professional.
- Explain what KYC is, why it exists and how it connects to money laundering and fraud prevention
- Map the Indian KYC framework from the PMLA and PML Rules to the RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA rulebooks
- Describe how FATF standards and India's mutual evaluation influence domestic KYC rules
Introduction to Revenue Recognition Manipulation Tactics
A concept-first foundation course on the line in the income statement that gets manipulated more than any other: revenue. You start with why revenue is the favourite target, how Ind AS 115 says revenue should be recognised, and why accrual accounting opens a gap between booking a sale and collecting the cash. Then you learn the two families of tactics. Timing tactics book real revenue too early: channel stuffing, bill-and-hold, aggressive percentage of completion and cut-off games. Amount tactics make revenue look bigger than it is: gross versus net, fictitious customers, round-tripping through related parties and other income passed off as operations. Next you learn what an outsider can actually see, using receivables and DSO, the gap between profit and operating cash flow, the revenue policy note and the auditor's report. The course closes with Indian case files and a revenue red flag checklist you can run on any listed company using its annual report and Screener.in. Built for commerce and finance students heading into forensic work, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to recognise inflated revenue before the market does.
- Explain why revenue is the most manipulated number in an income statement and who gains from inflating it
- Describe the Ind AS 115 five-step model and when revenue can legitimately be booked
- Recognise timing tactics: channel stuffing, bill-and-hold, percentage of completion games and cut-off manipulation
Introduction to Sanctions Screening and Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs)
A concept course on the two screening controls every regulated financial institution in India runs on its customers: sanctions screening and politically exposed person (PEP) screening. You start with what each control is for and the Indian legal base behind it, from the PMLA and PML Rules to Section 51A of the UAPA and Section 12A of the WMD Act. You then map the sanctions landscape: UN Security Council lists and how India implements them, domestic designations, and why OFAC, EU and UK regimes still matter to an Indian firm. The PEP chapters cover who counts as a PEP under FATF, the PML Rules and the RBI KYC Master Direction, how family members, close associates and beneficial owners extend the net, and why a PEP is a higher-risk customer rather than a prohibited one. The practice chapters explain screening points across the customer lifecycle, name matching and false positives, how alerts are investigated and dispositioned, and what happens after a confirmed sanctions match or a confirmed PEP. The course closes with record keeping, enforcement lessons and a screening framework for a small Indian broker or NBFC. Educational content only, not legal or regulatory advice.
- Explain what sanctions screening and PEP screening each protect against and why the outcomes of a hit are different
- Trace the Indian legal base for screening: PMLA, PML Rules, UAPA Section 51A, WMD Act Section 12A and RBI and SEBI directions
- Identify the lists that matter, from UN Security Council and MHA designations to OFAC, EU and UK regimes
Introduction to Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) and Their Filing Process
How India's suspicious transaction reporting regime actually works, from the law to the filing portal. Start with why STRs exist and where they sit in the PMLA framework, who counts as a reporting entity, and how an STR differs from cash, counterfeit currency, non-profit and cross-border wire reports. Learn the legal definition of a suspicious transaction clause by clause, the red flag indicators regulators expect you to know across banking, securities markets and insurance, and the misconceptions that cause missed filings. Then follow the full process: alert generation, investigation, the Principal Officer's decision, the reporting clock and submission to FIU-IND. Finish with tipping-off rules, the Section 14 safe harbour, real FIU-IND penalty orders, what happens to an STR after it is filed, and what separates a useful report from a defensive one. Written for compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, risk and compliance professionals, and aspiring forensic auditors.
Masterclass: Building and Leading a Forensic Audit Practice
A masterclass for people who already know how to run a forensic engagement and now have to build and lead the practice that runs dozens of them. It covers where forensic demand in India comes from and who pays for it, the legal and professional perimeter (Companies Act, RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management, SEBI LODR, PMLA and the ICAI Forensic Accounting and Investigation Standards), and the business of the practice itself: practice models, team leverage, the technology stack, pricing and utilisation. It then moves to running investigations at scale, with quality control, evidence management, senior management interviews and working alongside lawyers and regulators, before turning to reports that survive courts, NCLT and regulators, expert testimony and lender forensic audits. The final chapters deal with professional liability, data protection under the DPDP Act, ethics under promoter pressure, and how to hire, retain and build recurring revenue. The course closes with a capstone five-year plan for your own practice. Built for forensic practice leaders, chief compliance officers and senior financial crime investigators.
- Map the demand for forensic work in India and choose the service lines worth building
- Work inside the legal and professional perimeter set by the Companies Act, RBI, SEBI, PMLA and ICAI standards
- Design a practice model, team pyramid and technology stack that fit your market
Masterclass: How Chief Compliance Officers Structure Enterprise Wide AML Programs
A masterclass for chief compliance officers, forensic practice leaders and senior financial crime investigators and regulators who already understand how a single institution's AML program is built and now need to see it from the top of a financial group. A typical Indian group today holds a bank or NBFC, a stockbroker, an asset management company, an insurer, a payments business and often a GIFT IFSC unit or overseas branch. Each is a separate reporting entity under the PMLA with its own Principal Officer and its own regulator, yet customers, money and risk move freely between them. This course is about the decisions that only the group-level CCO makes: choosing a centralised, federated or hybrid operating model, writing a policy hierarchy that works across RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and IFSCA rules, sharing information inside the group within the limits of the PMLA and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, setting a board-approved financial crime risk appetite, building a single customer view, running overseas operations under the stricter-standard principle, funding and defending the technology stack, reporting to the board, managing several regulators at once, integrating acquisitions and leading the institution through an enforcement action and a multi-year remediation. All institutions and figures in worked examples are illustrative unless a public source is named; rules are stated as at the date of last review.
- Map a financial group's entities, regulators and PMLA reporting obligations and see where enterprise-wide risk hides between them
- Choose and defend a centralised, federated or hybrid financial crime operating model
- Write a group AML policy hierarchy and design intra-group information sharing that stays within the PMLA and DPDP Act
Masterclass: Lessons From India's Landmark Financial Fraud Investigations
A masterclass that studies India's landmark financial frauds from the investigator's chair. Instead of retelling the stories, each lesson asks how the fraud was detected, how the evidence trail was rebuilt, which agencies acted and in what order, where the investigation stalled, and what changed in regulation afterwards. You will work through market manipulation cases (Harshad Mehta, Ketan Parekh, NSEL, NSE co-location), corporate accounting frauds (Satyam, Ricoh India, Cox and Kings, Cafe Coffee Day), banking and lending frauds (PNB and Nirav Modi, DHFL, Yes Bank, PMC Bank, Kingfisher) and systemic cases (IL&FS, Sahara, Saradha, Karvy, Adani and Hindenburg, strictly on the public record). The final chapter distils three decades of cases into recurring red flags, investigation failure modes and an early-warning programme. Built for chief compliance officers, forensic practice leaders and senior financial crime investigators and regulators.
- Deconstruct any fraud investigation into detection, evidence, enforcement and recovery stages
- Explain how investigators rebuilt the evidence trail in India's landmark market, corporate and banking frauds
- Identify the red flags that were visible before each fraud surfaced, and who missed them
Masterclass: Navigating Regulatory Relationships as a Senior Compliance Leader
A masterclass for chief compliance officers, forensic practice leaders and senior financial crime investigators and regulators on the relationship that decides how an institution is treated when something goes wrong: the one with its regulators. Indian financial institutions answer to SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, IFSCA, FIU-IND and front-line bodies such as NSE, BSE and the depositories, each with its own supervisory style, tools and escalation path. This course covers the work of the person who owns that relationship: mapping regulators and how they supervise, setting up a single point of contact, writing correspondence that builds trust, engaging on consultation papers and informal guidance, deciding when and how to self-report, preparing for and running an inspection, closing findings, reading the path from an observation to a show cause notice, replying and appearing at a personal hearing, deciding whether to settle, managing a live appeal before the Securities Appellate Tribunal, understanding the compliance officer's personal exposure, holding the line against business pressure, reporting the relationship to the board, and handling multi-regulator issues, crises and overseas regulators. All institutions and figures in worked examples are illustrative unless a public source is named; rules are stated as at the date of last review.
- Map every regulator and front-line body your institution answers to and how each one actually supervises
- Design a single point of contact and write regulatory correspondence that builds credibility instead of eroding it
- Decide when and how to self-report a breach, and engage constructively on consultation papers and informal guidance
Practice Drills: Applying the Fraud Triangle to a Sample Case
A practice-first course built around one detailed sample case: a fictional listed Indian mid-cap with a lender exposure, a promoter under strain and a finance function that has quietly grown too powerful. You will work the case the way a forensic auditor, internal auditor or bank and NBFC compliance officer would. First you build an evidence worksheet. Then you drill each side of the fraud triangle in turn: pressure from covenants, pledged promoter shares, guidance and incentive pay; opportunity from control gaps in the revenue and cash cycle, weak audit committees, related party flows and lending-side weaknesses such as evergreening; and rationalisation from management language, internal emails and culture signals. You then score the case, extend it to the fraud diamond, and convert the findings into specific audit procedures under SA 240 and an escalation memo that respects Section 143(12) of the Companies Act and the RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management. The course ends with a blind second case and an honest look at where the triangle fails, using Satyam and PNB as hindsight tests.
- Use the fraud triangle as a structured evidence worksheet rather than a theory diagram
- Identify and grade financial, market and personal pressure from filings, pledges, covenants and pay structures
- Map control gaps in revenue, cash, procurement and related party flows that create opportunity
Practice Drills: Calculating Altman Z-Score on a Distressed Company
A practice-first companion to Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags. You already know what the Altman Z-Score is; this course makes you calculate it properly on distressed Indian companies, where the textbook inputs rarely sit cleanly on the face of the balance sheet. Working from Ind AS annual reports on NSE and BSE, Screener.in exports and the notes to accounts, you will rebuild all five ratios by hand, strip securities premium out of retained earnings, catch current maturities of long-term debt hiding outside short-term borrowings, normalise EBIT for exceptional items, and price equity through pledges and circuit-filter collapses. You will then pick the right model for manufacturers, service companies and private subsidiaries, stress the score for lease liabilities, contingent liabilities and corporate guarantees, learn exactly where the Z-Score breaks (NBFCs, banks, holding companies, manipulated books) and finish by writing a defensible Z-Score memo. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need a distress score that survives cross-examination.
- Choose correctly between the original Z, Z-prime and Z-double-prime models and apply the right zone cut-offs to each
- Map Ind AS balance sheet and P&L line items to all five Altman ratios without the common Screener.in shortcuts that distort them
- Rebuild retained earnings, working capital and EBIT from the notes to accounts, net of securities premium, revaluation reserves, exceptional items and current debt maturities
Practice Drills: Calculating Beneish M-Score on a Real Company's Financials
A calculation-first drill course on the Beneish M-Score, built for forensic auditors, compliance heads and financial crime investigators who need a score they can defend in a review meeting, not one copied off a screener. You will pull two or more years of inputs from Ind AS annual reports filed on NSE and BSE, map Schedule III's by-nature statements to Beneish's US-style lines, compute all eight variables by hand and in a spreadsheet, and then run the full model across five years for a listed Indian company, a company that later collapsed, and a group where standalone and consolidated scores diverge. The final chapter is about judgement: decomposing which variable moved the score, recognising false positives from acquisitions, sector quirks and genuine high growth, and writing the forensic note that turns a number into an escalation decision.
- Extract every Beneish input from an Ind AS annual report and reconcile it to Screener data
- Map Schedule III by-nature expense lines to COGS and SG&A proxies and apply them consistently
- Compute DSRI, GMI, AQI, SGI, DEPI, SGAI, LVGI and TATA by hand and explain what moves each one
Practice Drills: Conducting a Basic Forensic Audit Walkthrough
A practice-first course that walks you through one complete forensic audit engagement on a fictional listed Indian small-cap, from the day the mandate letter lands to the day the report goes to the audit committee. Every lesson is a drill that produces a working paper: the scope and work plan, the document request list and evidence log, a public records pull from MCA21 and exchange filings, a process walkthrough, ledger analytics with Benford analysis and duplicate tests, a revenue trace from invoice to bank credit, a vendor master test for shell suppliers, a related party fund flow map, interview notes, a loss quantification and the final report. You will also learn where a forensic engagement sits next to the statutory audit, how evidence must be handled so it survives scrutiny, and what reporting duties apply under Section 143(12) of the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and the RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management. The course closes with a second, shorter case you run end to end on your own. Built for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals in risk and compliance roles.
- Scope a forensic engagement from an allegation and turn it into a hypothesis-led work plan
- Build a document request list and an evidence log with a clean chain of custody
- Pull and cross-check public records from MCA21, NSE and BSE filings and annual reports
Practice Drills: Designing an AML Program Framework for a Mock Institution
A practice-first course built around one mock institution: a fictional mid-sized NBFC in the RBI Middle Layer that runs gold loans, MSME loans and digital personal loans through lending service providers, and has outgrown the AML program it started with. You play the newly hired Principal Officer and build its program from the ground up. First you map every obligation under the PMLA, the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules and the RBI KYC Directions into a requirements register. Then you run the institution-wide ML and TF risk assessment, build a customer risk rating model and assess new products and lending partners before launch. You define the Designated Director and Principal Officer mandates, draft the policy skeleton and the escalation paths, design due diligence tiers, beneficial ownership and PEP procedures and periodic KYC updation, and write the first transaction monitoring rule set, sanctions and UAPA Section 51A screening, the FIU-IND reporting calendar and the record retention design. The course closes with role-based training, the independent AML audit and program KPIs, a full AML Program Document for board approval and a response to an RBI inspection finding.
- Translate PMLA, the PML Rules and the RBI KYC Directions into a requirements register with an owner for every obligation
- Run an institution-wide ML and TF risk assessment and turn it into a working customer risk rating model
- Assess new products, digital channels and lending service providers for money laundering risk before launch
Practice Drills: Designing an Enterprise Wide Financial Crime Risk Framework
A practice-first masterclass for senior compliance, forensic and investigation professionals. You work one detailed sample case: a fictional Indian financial group with an NBFC, a SEBI-registered stock broker and a prepaid payment instrument issuer, each under a different regulator and each running its own financial crime controls in a silo. Your job is to design one enterprise-wide framework for it. You map the regulatory perimeter under the PMLA, RBI, SEBI and the Prevention of Corruption Act, build a financial crime risk taxonomy, score inherent risk by customer, product, channel and geography, test controls and derive residual risk, and write a risk appetite the board can actually use. You then design the governance model and management information, calibrate customer due diligence, transaction monitoring and screening, build an alert-to-case investigation workflow with correct reporting to FIU-IND, RBI and SEBI, and set up independent testing. The course closes with a board presentation and a stress test of your framework against real Indian enforcement patterns.
- Treat money laundering, fraud, sanctions, bribery and market abuse as one enterprise risk with shared data and governance
- Map the Indian regulatory perimeter for a multi-entity financial group across PMLA, RBI, SEBI and anti-corruption law
- Build an enterprise-wide risk assessment that scores inherent risk, control effectiveness and residual risk defensibly
Practice Drills: Drafting a Sample Suspicious Transaction Report
A practice-first course that walks you through drafting a Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) the way a Principal Officer's team at an Indian bank actually does it. You start with a transaction monitoring alert on a fictional customer and work it through every stage: triage, KYC file review, red flag mapping against FIU-IND indicators, fund flow tracing across accounts, the file or close decision, the grounds of suspicion narrative, the structured report fields, and a quality check before submission on FINnet. Along the way you learn the framework behind every step: the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, the PML (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005, the RBI and SEBI KYC directions, reporting timelines, the tipping-off prohibition and record retention. The course closes with a securities market variation for stock brokers and a second case you draft end to end on your own. All cases, names and figures are fictional and for training only. Built for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals in risk and compliance roles.
- Explain what an STR is, who must file one and how it differs from CTRs and other FIU-IND reports
- Triage a transaction monitoring alert and decide whether it deserves a full review
- Review a KYC file against actual account behaviour and spot profile mismatches
Practice Drills: Filling Out a Basic KYC Verification Checklist
A practice-first course for anyone who wants to do KYC, not just define it. You build one working KYC verification checklist and then fill it out, file after file, the way an onboarding analyst at a bank, NBFC or stockbroker such as Zerodha or a KRA-linked depository participant would. Each drill hands you a sample customer file with documents, declarations and verification records, and asks you to tick, flag or reject. You start with identity and address: PAN validation and Form 60 cases, Officially Valid Documents, Aadhaar offline verification and masking, and the name, date of birth and address mismatches that cause most rejections. You then check verification channels (in-person verification, Video KYC under V-CIP, CKYC and KRA records), record occupation, income and source of funds, screen for PEPs and sanctions lists, assign a risk category, and complete FATCA and CRS self-certification. Later drills cover partnership firms, LLPs, private limited companies, HUFs and trusts, including identifying the beneficial owner. The course ends with three full capstone files: a demat account opening, a rejected file that needs a discrepancy note, and a periodic re-KYC review. Every rule is tied back to the PMLA, the RBI KYC Master Direction and SEBI's KYC norms.
- Build and use a structured KYC verification checklist instead of relying on memory
- Verify PAN, Officially Valid Documents and Aadhaar-based records correctly, including when Form 60 applies
- Catch name, date of birth, address and signature mismatches before they become rejected files
Practice Drills: Identifying Corporate Governance Red Flags
A practice-first companion to Corporate Governance: Evaluating Management Quality. You already know what good governance is supposed to look like; this course makes you find the bad kind in real filings. Working with shareholding patterns, related party disclosures, board and auditor announcements, SEBI orders and exchange filings on NSE, BSE and Screener.in, you will build a governance red flag scorecard and drill it flag by flag: pledging and creeping dilution, money moving to group companies, weak boards, auditor exits, and management churn. The course closes with full drills that score companies side by side, replay the signals ahead of real Indian governance failures, and decide what to do when the flags show up in a stock you already own. Built for experienced retail investors, mutual fund investors and salaried professionals who want a repeatable governance check before they buy, or before they trust a fund that does.
- Locate every governance disclosure that matters in NSE and BSE filings, annual reports and Screener.in
- Build and apply a weighted governance red flag scorecard to any listed company
- Read shareholding patterns for pledging, promoter selling, warrants and creeping dilution
Practice Drills: Identifying Layering Patterns in Sample Transaction Data
A practice-first course on the hardest stage of money laundering to see: layering, where illicit funds are moved through accounts, channels and entities until the trail goes cold. You work on a fictional sample ledger from an Indian bank, with UPI, IMPS, NEFT, RTGS and cash entries, and drill one pattern at a time: rapid pass-through, structuring below reporting thresholds, fan-out and fan-in, circular flows and round-tripping, mule accounts and multi-hop chains. You then look at layering through payment aggregator wallets, trade invoices and shell companies, and securities and demat accounts, and learn to separate genuine suspicion from normal business activity. The course closes with a simple rule-based scoring model, a findings write-up for the investigation file, and a full end-to-end drill on a fresh dataset. Grounded in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, FIU-IND red flag indicators and RBI and SEBI KYC requirements. All names, accounts and figures are fictional and for training only. Built for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals in risk and compliance roles.
- Explain what layering is and how it differs from placement and integration
- Read a raw transaction ledger and build a baseline for each account
- Spot pass-through, structuring, fan-out, fan-in and circular flow patterns in sample data
Practice Drills: Identifying Red Flags in a Sample Annual Report
A practice-first foundation course built around one complete sample annual report: a fictional listed Indian consumer durables company whose FY26 report looks healthy on the cover and gets less healthy with every page you turn. You read it the way a forensic analyst or compliance reviewer would, in a fixed order. You start with the chairman's letter and management discussion, then the directors' report and corporate governance report, then the balance sheet, profit and loss and cash flow statement, then the notes to accounts, related party disclosures and the auditor's report with CARO remarks. Every lesson is a drill: you get an excerpt, you log the flags you find on a scorecard, and then you check your answers against a worked solution. The course ends with a timed blind drill on a second sample report and a simple framework for turning a flag count into an avoid, watch or dig-deeper call. Built for commerce and finance students heading into forensic work, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to spot fraud before it shows up in the share price.
- Read an annual report in a forensic order instead of front to back
- Spot where the chairman's letter and MD&A tell a story the numbers do not support
- Catch governance warning signs in the directors' report, board changes, auditor resignations and promoter pledges
Practice Drills: Investigating a Simulated Trade Based Money Laundering Case
A practice-first course built around one simulated trade-based money laundering investigation. A bank's transaction monitoring flags the trade finance account of a fictional mid-size Indian exporter, and you run the investigation from that alert to the final report. Every lesson is a drill that produces a working paper: a document reconciliation across invoice, shipping bill, bill of lading and bank realisation; a unit price test against market benchmarks; a shipment verification; an EDPMS match of export proceeds; a counterparty network map across the UAE, Hong Kong and Singapore; a round-tripping trace; a GST export refund test; an evidence timeline; a quantification of the value moved through mispricing; interview notes; and a draft Suspicious Transaction Report for FIU-IND. Along the way you learn the five core TBML typologies, how the Indian trade and foreign exchange framework under FEMA, the RBI Master Directions and PMLA creates both the paper trail and the reporting duties, and where an investigator's judgement ends and a regulator's begins. The course closes with a second, shorter case you work end to end on your own. All companies, people and figures in the case are fictional. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Recognise the five core TBML typologies and the red flags each one leaves in trade documents
- Reconcile an invoice, shipping bill, bill of lading and bank realisation and isolate the breaks
- Test declared unit prices against market benchmarks and size the implied value transfer
Practice Drills: Leading a Mock Large Scale Fraud Investigation Debrief
A leadership drill course for chief compliance officers, forensic practice leaders and senior financial crime investigators who have to stand up in front of a board, a regulator or a lenders' consortium and explain what went wrong in a large fraud. The investigation is already done. Your job is the debrief. You work on one mock case throughout: a fictional listed Indian NBFC where loans were routed through shell borrowers back to promoter entities, a multi-thousand-crore hole that the forensic team has spent months documenting. Every lesson is a drill that produces a piece of the debrief: an audience map, a findings hierarchy built from a long forensic report, an evidence-strength grading for each finding, a loss quantification walk, a board-ready fund flow map, a minute-by-minute audit committee run sheet, scripted responses to pushback, responsibility findings that respect natural justice, separate debrief packs for SEBI, RBI and SFIO, a lenders' consortium briefing under the RBI fraud risk framework, a privilege and LODR disclosure plan, a root cause and control failure map, a remediation tracker and an internal lessons-learned review. The course closes with a full capstone debrief you run end to end and score against a senior panel's rubric. The case, company and every number in it are fictional and illustrative.
- Map every audience of a fraud debrief and decide what each one needs, may see and must not see
- Compress a long forensic report into a findings hierarchy that a board can act on in one sitting
- Grade the evidence behind each finding and say plainly what is proven, probable or unresolved
Practice Drills: Reviewing a Sample Related Party Transaction Disclosure
Related party transactions are where money most often leaves a listed Indian company quietly: a royalty to the promoter's private firm, a loan to a group company that never comes back, purchases from a supplier owned by a director's relative. All of it has to be disclosed, but the disclosures are spread across the annual report, Form AOC-2, the half-yearly filing on NSE and BSE, and AGM notices, and most readers skip them. This foundation drill course hands you one fictional listed mid-cap's complete set of related party disclosures and teaches you to review them the way a forensic analyst, compliance professional or careful investor would. You will list who the related parties are, read and size every transaction, check that the right approvals were taken, run simple arm's length tests, cross-check the annual report against exchange filings, grade what you find, and write a one-page review note. No prior forensic experience is needed, only basic comfort with financial statements. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Find every place a listed Indian company discloses related party transactions and know what each document is meant to show
- Build a related party map from the disclosure and spot relationships that are missing or vaguely described
- Read the transactions table, closing balances and guarantees, and size each item against revenue, net worth and materiality thresholds
Practice Drills: Screening a Sample Client Against a PEP List
A practice-first course on politically exposed person (PEP) screening. You build one screening worksheet and one fictional client file, then work them drill by drill the way an onboarding or AML analyst at an Indian bank, NBFC or stockbroker does. You start with who counts as a PEP under the PML Rules, the RBI KYC Master Direction and SEBI's AML guidelines, and how PEP screening differs from sanctions screening. You then work the matching problems that cause most bad decisions: exact, partial and fuzzy name hits, transliteration, initials and Indian naming conventions, and using date of birth, nationality and address to separate a true match from a false positive. Next come the relationship drills: family members, close associates, and a PEP sitting behind a company or trust as beneficial owner. The decision drills cover dispositioning an alert, enhanced due diligence and source of wealth, senior management approval and writing a screening rationale that survives an audit. The course closes with rescreening an existing book when a list changes and two full capstone files. All clients, names and figures are fictional and for training only.
- Apply the PML Rules, RBI and SEBI definitions to decide who counts as a PEP, a family member or a close associate
- Tell PEP screening apart from sanctions screening and adverse media checks, and know what each one triggers
- Work exact, partial and fuzzy name hits, including transliteration, initials and Indian naming conventions
Practice Drills: Spotting Forensic Red Flags in Financial Statements
A practice-first companion to Deep Dive into Financial Statement Fraud and Forensic Red Flags. You already know the theory of revenue games, capitalised costs, hidden debt and accrual manipulation; this course makes you find them yourself. Every lesson is a drill built on Indian filings: Screener.in data, annual reports and exchange disclosures on NSE and BSE, auditor reports and CARO remarks, and the notes to accounts where problems are usually disclosed in plain sight. You will rebuild ten-year forensic worksheets, reconcile profit to cash, test capitalisation and depreciation choices, dig out contingent liabilities and standalone versus consolidated gaps, compute the Beneish M-Score and Sloan accruals by hand, and finish with blind full-company drills that end in a position decision. Built for experienced retail investors, active traders and HNI investors who want a repeatable forensic routine rather than a list of scandals.
- Build a ten-year forensic worksheet for any listed Indian company from Screener.in and BSE/NSE filings
- Test whether reported revenue and margins are confirmed by cash collections, input costs and peers
- Catch capitalised expenses, stuck CWIP, depreciation policy changes and deferred impairments
Practice Drills: Spotting Revenue Recognition Red Flags in Sample Financials
A practice-first foundation course on the single most manipulated line in any income statement: revenue. You start with how Ind AS 115 says revenue should be recognised, in plain words, and a small toolkit of ratios you can compute from Screener.in and an annual report. Then you work through sample financials of three fictional listed Indian companies, each hiding a different revenue problem. Every lesson is a drill: you get an excerpt of the numbers or notes, you log the flags you find, and you check your answers against a worked solution. You will catch receivables that outrun sales, fourth-quarter spikes and channel stuffing, bill-and-hold sales, swelling unbilled revenue, gross-versus-net games, related party sales, other income passed off as operations, and revenue that GST returns and cash collections do not confirm. The course ends with a timed blind drill and a simple framework for turning a flag count into an avoid, watch or dig-deeper call. Built for commerce and finance students heading into forensic work, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to spot inflated revenue before the market does.
- Explain the Ind AS 115 five-step model and when revenue can actually be booked
- Compute the five core revenue red flag ratios from Screener.in data and annual report notes
- Spot timing games: receivables outrunning sales, fourth-quarter spikes, bill-and-hold and swelling unbilled revenue
Practice Drills: Tracing a Layered Transaction Network on Sample Data
An advanced, practice-first course on tracing layered funds through a network of accounts, the work a forensic auditor or financial crime investigator does after the alert fires. You start with a fictional case file: a victim complaint, statements from several Indian banks, wallet and payment aggregator records, and KYC data. You resolve accounts into real-world entities, turn the ledger into an edge list, draw the network and use centrality and community detection to find hubs, brokers and collector accounts. You then follow the money hop by hop and allocate tainted funds using FIFO, LIFO, pro-rata and the lowest intermediate balance rule, and handle cash withdrawals, splits and dead ends. Further drills take the trace through wallets, trade invoices and cross-border remittances, and crypto exchanges. The course closes with an evidence-grade fund flow chart, a proceeds-of-crime and freeze schedule, a trace report for FIU-IND, law enforcement or the board, and a full end-to-end trace on a fresh dataset. Grounded in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, FIU-IND reporting, RBI KYC Directions and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. All names, accounts and figures are fictional and for training only. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Resolve accounts across banks into real-world entities using PAN, mobile, device and address links
- Convert a raw transaction ledger into an edge list and a fund flow network graph
- Use centrality and community detection to find hubs, brokers, collectors and hidden clusters
Understanding Complex Layering and Trade Based Money Laundering
An advanced concept course on the layering stage of money laundering and on trade based money laundering (TBML). You learn why layering is the hardest stage to detect, the techniques used to build complex layering chains in India (shell companies, accommodation entries, mule accounts, securities market schemes, hawala and crypto), and the role professional enablers play. The course then breaks down TBML: over and under invoicing, multiple invoicing, phantom shipments, misdescribed goods and services invoicing, and how each maps onto India's trade finance and foreign exchange plumbing, GST invoicing and high-risk commodities such as gold and diamonds. Real Indian cases anchor the material. The final chapter covers detection: red flag indicators, unit price benchmarking, network analysis and building a defensible suspicious transaction report for FIU-IND. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Explain why layering is the hardest stage of money laundering to detect and what makes a layering scheme complex
- Recognise the main layering techniques used in India, from shell companies and accommodation entries to mule accounts and bogus LTCG schemes
- Break down the core TBML techniques and calculate the value moved by over and under invoicing
Understanding Cross Border Money Laundering Through Shell Structures
A concept course for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators who need to understand shell structures from the inside. It takes apart the corporate vehicles that launderers use, from shell and front companies to nominee directors, trusts and layered holding chains in conduit jurisdictions, and shows how money actually crosses India's border through round tripping on the FDI and overseas investment routes, trade mispricing, hawala and back-to-back credit arrangements. You then work through the Indian legal net of the PMLA, FEMA, the Black Money Act and the Benami law, the beneficial ownership and layering rules under the Companies Act, and what the government and SEBI shell company crackdowns revealed. The second half is investigative: mapping ownership chains with public data, tracing fund flows across jurisdictions, reading related party disclosures for red flags and obtaining evidence from abroad. It closes with Indian case files and the detection controls an institution needs against shell structure risk.
- Distinguish shell, shelf, front and conduit companies and explain why each appeals to launderers
- Map the placement, layering and integration stages onto specific offshore vehicles, trusts and holding chains
- Trace how illicit money crosses India's border through round tripping, trade mispricing, hawala and back-to-back credit
Understanding Cryptocurrency and Its Use in Money Laundering Schemes
A practitioner's guide to cryptocurrency as a money laundering channel, written for the Indian regulatory setting. You start with what an investigator must understand about blockchains, wallets, stablecoins and exchanges, then work through India's framework: virtual digital assets under PMLA since March 2023, FIU-IND registration for offshore and domestic exchanges, Section 115BBH tax and 1 percent TDS as an investigative trail, and FATF Recommendation 15 with the Travel Rule. The core of the course maps the laundering typologies in use today, from mixers, privacy coins and chain hopping to DeFi bridges, NFT wash trading, P2P mule networks and crypto-hawala rails. You then learn how blockchain tracing works, what analytics tools can and cannot prove, and how to spot crypto exposure in bank and exchange data. Indian cases anchor the theory: the ED's instant loan app probe, the GainBitcoin Ponzi and the 2024 WazirX hack. The course closes with an investigation and risk framework playbook. Educational content only, not legal or investment advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Read a blockchain transaction and explain what it does and does not reveal about the parties
- Explain how virtual digital asset service providers came under PMLA and what FIU-IND registration requires
- Use the VDA tax and TDS trail as a source of investigative evidence
Understanding Cyber Fraud and Digital Payment Frauds in India
India runs the world's largest real-time payments system, and fraudsters have built an industry on top of it. This course takes digital payment fraud apart the way a forensic auditor or a bank's fraud risk team would. Start with the payment rails themselves, UPI, IMPS, NEFT, cards, wallets and AePS, and the four-stage path every fraud follows from first contact to cash-out. Then work through the schemes one family at a time: fake KYC calls and phishing, UPI collect and QR code tricks, digital arrest scams, fake trading apps and task frauds, SIM swaps, card and AePS frauds, and remote access takeovers. Follow the money through mule account networks and learn the transaction patterns that give them away. Finish with the rulebook, RBI's fraud risk Master Directions, the customer liability framework, the 1930 helpline and I4C machinery, and the IT Act, BNS and PMLA, then the controls, response playbooks and investigation steps an institution actually uses. Written for bank and NBFC compliance officers, aspiring forensic auditors and risk professionals.
- Map how each major Indian payment rail (UPI, IMPS, NEFT, cards, wallets, AePS) is exploited and where its weak points sit
- Recognise the mechanics of social engineering frauds, from fake KYC calls to digital arrest scams and fake trading apps
- Explain technical frauds such as SIM swaps, card-not-present fraud, AePS biometric cloning and remote access takeovers
Understanding FATF Guidelines and Global AML Standards
A concept course for compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, aspiring forensic auditors and risk professionals who know the basics of KYC and suspicious transaction reporting and now need to understand the global system those rules come from. It explains what the Financial Action Task Force is and how a body with no treaty and no fines gets every country to comply, then decodes the 40 Recommendations group by group: the risk-based approach, preventive measures for financial institutions, beneficial ownership transparency, the powers of FIUs and law enforcement, and the special regime for terrorist and proliferation financing. You learn how mutual evaluations grade countries on technical compliance and the 11 Immediate Outcomes, how the grey and black lists work and what grey listing has cost countries like Pakistan and the UAE. The course then turns to India: what the 2024 mutual evaluation found, how FATF standards shaped the PMLA amendments and RBI, SEBI and IRDAI rules, and what all this means for Indian investors and cross-border money. It closes with virtual assets and the travel rule, the wider ecosystem of EU, US, Wolfsberg, Basel and Egmont standards, and where global AML rules are heading.
- Explain what FATF is, how its network of member countries and regional bodies works, and why its standards bind countries without a treaty
- Navigate the 40 Recommendations and explain the risk-based approach, preventive measures and beneficial ownership rules they set
- Describe the FATF regime for terrorist financing, proliferation financing, targeted financial sanctions and non-profit organisations
Understanding Financial Statement Fraud: The Fraud Triangle Framework
Financial statement fraud is rarely the work of a career criminal. It is usually committed by senior people at real companies who were under pressure, saw a gap in the controls and told themselves a story that made it acceptable. This course teaches the fraud triangle, the framework Donald Cressey built from interviews with convicted embezzlers, as the lens auditors, compliance officers and investigators use to explain and anticipate that behaviour. You will separate error and aggressive accounting from fraud, then study each side of the triangle in depth with Indian evidence: covenant breaches, promoter pledges and guidance pressure; weak controls, captured audit committees and related party complexity; and the language of rationalisation in letters, earnings calls and annual reports. Satyam, IL&FS, DHFL and Gensol Engineering are read through the framework. The course then covers its extensions (the fraud diamond, pentagon and fraud scale), its honest limitations, and how it is embedded in Indian practice through SA 240 and the RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management. Written for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals in risk and compliance roles.
- Distinguish honest error, aggressive accounting and financial statement fraud using intent and materiality
- Explain where the fraud triangle came from and what Cressey's research actually found
- Identify financial, market and personal pressure from public filings, pledge data and pay structures
Understanding Insolvency Fraud and Asset Stripping Before Bankruptcy
By the time a company is admitted into insolvency, the most valuable assets have often already left the building. Brands move to promoter entities, cash leaves as advances to suppliers that never deliver, the parent's debts get secured on the subsidiary's land, and friendly creditors appear on the claims list. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code gives resolution professionals and lenders the tools to reverse this: preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate transactions under Sections 43 to 51, and personal liability for fraudulent and wrongful trading under Section 66. This advanced concept course is for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigators. It covers the asset stripping playbook used in Indian promoter-led groups, the legal tests and look-back periods for each avoidance transaction, how the CoC process itself gets manipulated, how a forensic transaction audit is scoped and run under the CIRP Regulations, and what happens to avoidance recoveries and parallel ED, CBI and SFIO proceedings after a resolution plan is approved, with Jaypee Infratech, DHFL, Bhushan Power and Steel and other Indian cases throughout. Educational content only, not investment or legal advice.
- Why the months before insolvency are when value is most often stripped from a company, and the warning signs that show up in filings first
- How to distinguish preferential, undervalued, fraudulent and extortionate transactions under Sections 43, 45, 49 and 50 of the IBC, including look-back periods and defences
- The asset stripping playbook in Indian promoter groups: slump sales, brand and IP transfers, supplier advances, inter-corporate deposits and collateral shifting
Understanding International Cooperation in Financial Crime Investigation
Financial crime crosses borders in seconds. Investigations cross them in years. This course explains the machinery that closes that gap: mutual legal assistance treaties, letters rogatory, FIU-to-FIU exchange through the Egmont Group, SEBI's use of the IOSCO multilateral MoU, tax information exchange under DTAAs, CRS and FATCA, Interpol notices, extradition and cross-border asset recovery. You learn who India's central authorities are, how a request is drafted and routed, why requests stall on dual criminality, specialty and foreign data protection rules, and how foreign evidence is made admissible in an Indian court. Real cases anchor every chapter: the HSBC Geneva list, the Panama and Pandora Papers, Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and 1MDB. The course closes with the practitioner's side: building a cross-border evidence pack that agencies can actually use and handling foreign requests that land on an Indian institution. Educational content only, not legal advice. Built for senior forensic auditors, chief compliance officers and financial crime investigation professionals.
- Explain why sovereignty creates an evidence gap and which treaties and standards bridge it
- Identify India's central authorities for MLA, extradition, FIU exchange, securities and tax requests
- Follow an MLAT request and a letter rogatory from drafting to execution abroad
Understanding Related Party Transaction Red Flags
A foundation concept course for investors who want to catch governance trouble early, commerce and finance students heading into forensic work, and compliance aspirants. Related party transactions are deals between a listed company and people or entities close to its promoters, and in India they are the single most common channel through which minority shareholders lose value. The course explains who counts as a related party, why most related party deals are perfectly normal, and how the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and Ind AS 24 control them through audit committee approval, materiality thresholds and shareholder votes. It then walks through the classic red flags one by one: loans and advances to promoter entities, royalties and brand fees, odd-priced purchases and sales with group companies, asset transfers, guarantees, and undisclosed or shell related parties. Real Indian cases, from Satyam and Maytas to DHFL, Fortis and Zee, show how each pattern played out. You finish with simple sizing ratios, a guide to reading shareholder votes and auditor remarks, and a ten minute red flag check you can run on any NSE or BSE listed company.
- Explain what a related party transaction is and identify who counts as a related party of an Indian listed company
- Tell routine, arm's length related party deals apart from ones that move value away from minority shareholders
- Summarise how the Companies Act, SEBI LODR and Ind AS 24 require related party transactions to be approved and disclosed
Understanding SEBI and RBI's Roles in Financial Crime Prevention
A ground-up guide to how India's two main financial regulators prevent, detect and punish financial crime. Start with the map: what counts as financial crime, why SEBI and RBI have very different mandates, and where agencies such as the ED, FIU-IND, SFIO and CBI fit in. Then go inside SEBI's fight against market crime: insider trading, manipulation and front running under the PIT and PFUTP Regulations, how exchange surveillance flags suspicious trades, and the orders, penalties and settlements SEBI uses once it finds them. Next, go inside RBI's rulebook for banking crime: how banks must classify and report frauds, early warning signals and red-flagged accounts, wilful defaulters, KYC obligations and the rules on digital payment fraud and customer liability. See both regulators at work in real Indian cases, then learn how to verify an entity's registration, where to report fraud, and what compliance and investigation careers look like.
- Explain which kinds of financial crime fall under SEBI, which under RBI, and which go to other agencies
- Describe what SEBI's insider trading and PFUTP rules prohibit, with Indian examples of each
- Understand how surveillance flags suspicious trades and what SEBI can do once it finds wrongdoing
Understanding Shell Companies and Layering Techniques
An intermediate course on the single most common vehicle for laundering money in India: the shell company. Learn what legally counts as a shell, how one is incorporated and kept alive on paper, and why dummy directors, accommodation entries and share premium make them so useful to launderers and tax evaders. Then work through the layering techniques that move money through them: circular transactions, round tripping, bogus share capital and unsecured loans, fake GST invoices, penny stock LTCG schemes and multi-layer holding structures. Map the Indian legal net, from the Companies Act layering limits and significant beneficial owner rules to PMLA, the Benami Act and the 2017 shell company crackdown, and finish by learning how to spot shells using MCA data, financial statements and bank statements, with real Indian cases throughout.
- Define a shell company and separate it from legitimate holding, dormant and special purpose companies
- Explain how entry operators use dummy directors and paper companies to sell accommodation entries
- Trace the main layering techniques: circular flows, bogus share capital, unsecured loans, fake GST invoices and penny stock LTCG schemes
Understanding Transaction Monitoring Systems in Banks
A concept course for compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, aspiring forensic auditors and risk professionals who want to understand the machine at the centre of every bank's AML programme. It explains why Indian banks must monitor transactions under the PMLA and RBI's KYC Directions, where monitoring sits between KYC, screening and reporting to FIU-IND, and how real-time payment monitoring differs from overnight batch scans. You then open up the engine: the data it consumes from core banking and channel systems, how customer risk rating and segmentation shape what it looks for, and why poor data quality quietly breaks most systems. The course decodes detection scenarios, from structuring and rapid movement of funds to dormant account reactivation and UPI mule networks, and follows an alert through triage, investigation and case management to a filed STR. It closes with the hard problems: false positives, threshold tuning, performance metrics and model validation, the shift to machine learning and network analytics, and what regulators in India and abroad have done to banks whose monitoring failed.
- Explain what a transaction monitoring system does and the legal obligations under the PMLA and RBI rules that require Indian banks to run one
- Place monitoring correctly alongside KYC, sanctions screening and FIU-IND reporting, and distinguish real-time from post-event monitoring
- Describe the data a monitoring system needs and how customer risk rating and segmentation drive what it detects
Understanding the Basics of Financial Statement Auditing
A concept course on the financial statement audit as it works in India. You will learn what an audit does and does not promise, how reasonable assurance and materiality shape the work, and who is responsible for what between management, the auditor and the audit committee. You will see the rules that govern a statutory audit under the Companies Act, 2013, the Standards on Auditing issued by ICAI, and the oversight role of NFRA, along with auditor independence and rotation. You will then follow the audit itself, from planning and risk assessment through controls testing, substantive procedures, evidence, sampling and going concern. Finally you will learn to read an Indian auditor's report section by section, tell the four opinion types apart, use Key Audit Matters and CARO 2020 remarks, and spot the auditor red flags that preceded failures like Satyam and IL&FS. Built for commerce and finance students, compliance career aspirants, and investors who want to know what the audit report on a listed company is really telling them.
- Explain what a financial statement audit does, and what reasonable assurance and materiality really mean
- Separate the responsibilities of management, the statutory auditor and the audit committee
- Describe how the Companies Act, 2013, ICAI's Standards on Auditing and NFRA govern audits in India
Understanding the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in India
A plain-language guide to India's Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 for students, investors and anyone heading into a compliance career. Learn how Section 3 defines the offence, why the PMLA was enacted, and how scheduled offences act as the gateway to every case. Walk through the reporting machinery that binds banks, brokers and other reporting entities, from the PML Rules and record keeping to the CTRs and STRs filed with FIU-IND. Then follow a case from the Enforcement Directorate's ECIR through search, arrest, Section 50 statements and provisional attachment, on to the Adjudicating Authority, Special Courts, the twin conditions for bail and confiscation. Finally, read the PMLA through the Supreme Court's lens, from Vijay Madanlal Choudhary to later rulings that set limits on ED power, and see what the law means in practice for investors, your broker account and compliance professionals.
- Explain what Section 3 of the PMLA makes an offence and how scheduled offences trigger the law
- Describe the obligations of reporting entities under the PML Rules, including KYC, record keeping and reporting to FIU-IND
- Tell CTRs, STRs and other FIU-IND reports apart and know when each is filed
Understanding the Role of a Compliance Officer in Financial Institutions
A practical course on the compliance function inside Indian financial institutions, written for aspiring forensic auditors, compliance staff at banks and NBFCs, and finance professionals moving into risk and compliance roles. It explains where compliance sits next to risk management, internal audit and legal, how RBI, SEBI, IRDAI, PFRDA, IFSCA and FIU-IND each define the compliance officer's role, and what the PMLA roles of principal officer and designated director add. It then walks through the working programme: the compliance policy, the obligations register, compliance risk assessment, monitoring and testing, and sign-off on new products and new circulars. Day-to-day areas covered include KYC and AML, insider trading controls, conduct and customer protection, and regulatory reporting. The final chapters cover independence and reporting lines, board reporting, personal accountability, handling breaches, inspections and enforcement, whistleblower channels, and how to build a career in compliance. All institutions and figures in worked examples are illustrative unless a public source is named; rules are stated as at the date of last review.
- Explain what a compliance officer does and how the role differs from risk management, internal audit and legal
- Map which regulator governs which institution and how RBI, SEBI and IRDAI each define the compliance officer's role
- Understand the PMLA roles of principal officer and designated director and how they sit alongside the compliance officer