Whistleblowing has generally been portrayed as a kind of James Bond-style of taking down corrupt corporates. However, that is hardly the case in reality. Sylvain Mansotte knows that too, having worked at Leighton Holdings, one of Australia’s biggest contracting firms.
During his time at the firm, he was able to uncover over $20 million worth of fraud in the company’s books. However, he was scared to come forward – but fortunately, the culprit ended up in jail. Mansotte identified the issue of coming forward to report a fraud as a serious problem while he was working in the risk and fraud department at Leighton for two years.
Many people worry about being blacklisted, losing their job, and the myriad of other consequences that could arise from blowing the whistle and being found out. The most important thing in these cases is anonymity, which is hard to guarantee.
This Mansotte’s experience was the birth of the startup FraudSec that looks to help individuals to whistleblow in anonymity. FraudSec is an app that was launched in April, enabling whistleblowers give, and organisations collect, anonymous tips about fraud and other on goings within an organisation.
The FraudSec app allows organisations to create incident forms and avail them to employees by distributing URLs and QR codes. Employees can then submit information including documents, photos and other media anonymously through the app’s 256 bit encryption to protect whistleblower’s IP address .The whistleblower gets a case number, by which they can use to access a two-way communication channel with the organisation.
The startup is based in Sydney and founded by Sylvain Mansotte with his former colleague, Matthew Browne and Richard Ross. Browne had moved to the Commonwealth Bank late last year, where he met Ross before coming together to develop the FraudSec bulletproof platform. Mansotte is the CEO, Browne acts as the CTO and Ross is now CIO of FraudSec.
FraudSec has developed a good client base, with one of the big four accounting firms using the platform and “a large multinational” active in over 150 countries also on board – a remarkable achievement since launching in April. The startup is looking to raise a seed round of anywhere between $1.5 to $3 million over the next few months to speed up its product development and expansion strategies.
[Source] Sydney startup FraudSec is a whistleblowing platform that guarantees anonymity
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