I remember first hearing about this in the context of detecting tax fraud, years back, and thought that it was fascinating.
Accounting fraud detection
In 1972, Hal Varian suggested that the law could be used to detect possible fraud in lists of socio-economic data submitted in support of public planning decisions. Based on the plausible assumption that people who fabricate figures tend to distribute their digits fairly uniformly, a simple comparison of first-digit frequency distribution from the data with the expected distribution according to Benford's law ought to show up any anomalous results.[33]
Use in criminal trials
In the United States, evidence based on Benford's law has been admitted in criminal cases at the federal, state, and local levels.[34]