Ken Citarella is Managing Director, Investigations and Cyber Forensics for Guidepost Solutions.
Ken joined Guidepost in September 2010 as Project Manager for claim fraud investigations for the Gulf Coast Claims Facility in its administration of the $20 billion BP compensation fund. In that capacity, Ken supervised a staff of 300 professionals, including over 200 field investigators. Nearly 18,000 claims were referred for investigation, many of which involved the financial analysis of a claimant's business operations, including numerous construction-related entities. The project team wrote thousands of fraud reports which were described by an official of the U.S. Department of Justice as the finest body of investigative work he had ever seen.
Ken also worked as part of Guidepost's Integrity Monitor team in the New York City Rapid Repair program overseeing Sandy-related reconstruction on Staten Island. Guidepost monitored those residential repairs from initial assessment through final walk through, documenting work order authorizations and variances between authorized work and actual performance, permitting New York City to properly evaluate invoices and satisfactory performance by contractors.
Before joining Guidepost Solutions, Ken worked with a commercial litigation law firm and with the Corporate Investigations Division of Prudential.
Ken had a distinguished 28-year career as a white-collar and computer crime prosecutor in the Westchester County (NY) District Attorney's Office, which he concluded as Deputy Chief of the Investigations Division. Ken prosecuted investment frauds, larcenies, embezzlements, anti-trust violations, public corruption, forgeries and many other economic crimes. A pioneer in computer crime prosecution, Ken obtained convictions for computer intrusions, malicious software attacks, a software time bomb, spamming, digital child pornography and the use of the Internet for child exploitation, among other cases.
Ken is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law School, where he teaches a cybercrime course, a Certified Fraud Examiner and Certified Information Privacy Professional. Ken has lectured widely before professional, legal, academic, corporate and community groups on computer crime and fraud related issues. In 2011, Ken received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the High Technology Crime Investigation Association.