1 Million Cups Live Stream: PhonyInvoices

Wednesday July 23, 2013 1 Million Cups will be live streamed. The entrepreneurial pitch program created by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation meets for weekly coffee at 9 am. The caffeinated morning event engages Kansas City’s entrepreneurs to be supportive, mentor, learn, and connect the community. This week, 1 Million Cups is featuring only one start-up. This start up has a unique service and a very experienced founding team.

PhonyInvoices.com (PDIC Services) was formed in May of 2011, because of a problem that Barnett C. Helzberg Jr. experienced as the leader of retail jeweler, Helzberg Diamonds. Barnett C. Helzberg Jr. was frustrated with his encounters with fraudulent invoice schemes that paid criminals.

Helzberg and his partners have created an array of services that detect and prevent invoice fraud. Invoice fraud happens to small businesses, to government agencies, and to large companies such as Best Buy. There are criminals using mass mailing, faxing, and email to make fake invoices that are mistakenly paid.

Everyday PDIC Services is watching for the arrival of new scams and the resurgence of old ones. Their mission is, “To save our clients money and to put criminals out of business by exposing their tactics and cutting of their revenue streams.”

PDIC Services run a diagnostics check on company’s vendor list and results are compared to PhonyInvoices’ database of known scams. Once scams in the accounts payable are discovered and taken out, PDIC Services will create their own fake invoices to train the company’s accounts payable personnel.  PDIC Services runs a report for the company and will continue to help prevent invoice fraud as criminals develop new scams.