Most of the time, forensic accounting is used when someone commits fraud. For this reason, forensic accountants are often referred to as fraud investigators or fraud examiners. Fraud takes many forms, but no matter how you look at it, fraud is theft; it is profiting by deceit or trickery and involves the theft of funds or information or the use of someone's assets without permission.

Ever wonder just how prevalent various crimes are? Or about what you should do if you witness a crime? This Cheat Sheet covers that and more, such as how investigators approach a crime scene and the tools they bring to bear in their search for clues, as well as how the medical examiner or coroner determines the cause, mechanism, and manner of death.

Staging is when someone who's committed a crime attempts to make the scene look like something that it isn't. The most common staging scenario occurs when someone tries to make a murder look like a suicide or an accident. The suspect may move the body or clean certain areas. Say, for example, a husband strikes his wife in the head with a blunt object, killing her.

Locating evidence can be straightforward: Someone calls the police to report a burglary, and when the police arrive the victim invites them in and shows them the location of the pried-open window, the family safe, and the perpetrator's escape route. But, in other cases, the probable location of the evidence is not always associated with a crime scene, and police are not invited into the area where the evidence may be located.

Because forensics is such a hot topic these days, millions of viewers are becoming armchair experts on that subject. But is Hollywood reliable? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The quick death A gun is shot or a knife is thrown and down goes one of the bad guys, perhaps clutching his chest or taking one last dramatic breath, but either way, he's instantly a goner.

From the moment the first police officer arrives at the crime scene, he follows a strict set of procedural guidelines designed to protect him and everyone else who's present; guard evidence against damage, contamination, or loss; and document everything that occurs at the scene. Following these procedures and maintaining control of the scene until the crime-scene investigators arrive offer the best chance of getting the evidence needed to identify and convict the perpetrator.

Picture yourself being buried alive. People living prior to the 19th century had good reason to worry about such matters, because stethoscopes hadn't been invented, and determinations of death were more a guessing game than a scientific pursuit. A weak heartbeat meant you'd probably be pronounced dead — only to wake up while your body was being prepared for burial.

If you don't know what you're looking for, finding it is nearly impossible. Profiling, or looking at evidence and making a best guess as to the type of individual who would commit the crime in question, helps investigators get a firm grasp on whom it is they're trying to track down. The profiler, usually a specially trained FBI agent,looks at the crime scene, autopsy data, victim, and likely precrime and postcrime behaviors of the killer to make this assessment.