Holiday and pandemic-caused pressures can lead to increased levels of employee theft this fall. Even the most honest employees might commit fraud if they feel desperate, see an opportunity, and can rationalize their behavior.

Here are 10 strategies to protect your business:

IAS can help you identify, deter, investigate and resolve fraud in your company. We can audit your internal controls, create a loss prevention and internal audit program, conduct loss prevention workshops, and most importantly investigate suspected fraud.

Our investigations can obtain signed confessions, restitution and even prosecutions.

Phishing scams proliferate during the holiday season because they look a lot like the typical emails you see this time of the year. They typically ramp up in October with incidents jumping 50% from the annual average.

Now is the time to bump up your email security strategies and start employee training. Studies show that trained employees can reduce their click-thru rate on malicious emails, links and attachments from 13% to 33%. It can also reduce their susceptibility to phishing by 75% and reduce the risk of a data breach by 70%.

Phishing ploys can appear in multiple forms, including holiday e-cards, fake coupons and deals, year-end surveys, and bogus shipment tracking messages.

Employees should be on the alert for unexpected mail and messages containing PDFs, Zip attachments, shortened URLs, certificate warnings, and security alerts.

Here are a few tips that will help your employees avoid falling victim to a scam: