Not your ordinary P.I. firm. Where did the company name originate?
After retiring from the Metro Police Service, Jake Barclay started the firm with his long-time partner, Bosco Poon. Bosco wasn't interested in having his name on company letterhead. He'd rather be out and about training rookie Pis and rousting ne’er do wells, so most of the administration work falls to Jake.
Frank Benford Jr. was an American electrical engineer and research physicist who is best remembered for his 1938 study of more than 20,000 numbers from varied sources, which popularized the first-digit pattern now called Benford’s Law.
Benford’s Law is a surprising pattern in many real-world lists of numbers—like town populations, river lengths, or company sales: numbers start with 1 much more often than they start with 9. About 30 out of 100 numbers begin with 1, while fewer than 5 out of 100 begin with 9, because growing quantities spend more “number space” starting with small digits before they reach the next ten or hundred. It does not work for every list, especially numbers people choose or assign, such as phone numbers or postal codes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...]
Kenora’s second case involved suspected inventory fraud at a high end fashion store called Magasin Bernard in downtown Toronto. She and her associate, Gavin, used Benford’s Law as an indicator that someone might be fudging the figures or cooking the books. Mind you, a mismatch with Benford’s pattern only points to transactions worth checking; real fraud needs evidence from the records themselves.
What they looked for was whether the first digits of many natural-looking transaction amounts occurred in the usual random pattern. If not, they zeroed in on unusual clusters. For example, in a bank account with thousands of vendor payments, an analyst might notice too many payments beginning with 59—such as $5,901, $5,935, and $5,987—when a $6,000 payment required manager approval. That pattern could suggest someone was inventing payments or splitting bills just below the limit. She and Gavin followed up by examining those specific payments: who entered them, which vendors received them, invoices and approvals, dates, and whether the same employee controlled several steps.
The name Friday is, of course, an homage to a fictional Los Angeles police detective Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb. The crime drama Dragnet ran on radio then television, between 1949 and 1970.
