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Although fraud is widespread, little remains known about the specific psychological characteristics of fraudsters that can be used in prevention or treatment. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine the socio-emotional competencies and moral judgement abilities of convicted fraudsters in comparison with other groups of offenders.

The investigation included imprisoned face-to-face fraudsters (n=11), imprisoned violent offenders (n=10) and non-offenders who had completed the Emotional Competence Questionnaire and the Sociomoral Reflection Measure.

Fraudsters displayed a significantly higher capacity to recognise emotions in others compared with the other two groups. In addition, there were no differences in socio-emotional skills between the groups. In terms of moral judgement ability, fraudsters and non-offenders demonstrated a level of a mature moral judgement. The moral judgement abilities of the violent offenders were significantly lower.

Therapeutic work with fraudsters should focus on the awareness and sense of responsibility for fellow human beings having regard to their specific self-image and justification schemes. For prevention, an adoption of a structural orientation of work processes, that is, geared more towards teamwork is recommended. Moreover, a positive impact of unethical management on the risk of fraud offenses is pointed out.

This paper follows an innovative methodological approach by examining the socio-emotional competencies and moral judgement abilities of convicted fraudsters and has implications for risk management both therapeutically and organisationally.

The social interaction between a deceiver and the deceived opponent is a determining factor for deception that involves emotions. Hence, besides a great amount of cognitive control, a successful lie also requires the regulation of emotions, especially when deceiving somebody face-to-face. The purpose of this paper is to investigate emotion regulation processes in an interpersonal lying experiment and aimed to examine whether fraudsters have well-functioning emotion regulation strategies or show a lack of emotional processes when deceiving face-to-face.

Imprisoned fraudsters (n=11), imprisoned violent offenders (n=10) and non-offenders (n=11) spontaneously deceived an interrogator in a face-to-face situation while the deceivers’ EEG was recorded.

The results showed that a decrease of alpha activity in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) predicted a higher frequency of deceptive responses as well as less guilt about deceiving the interrogator. These findings suggest a pivotal role of the left dlPFC in emotion regulation during deception for fraudsters, violent offenders and non-offenders. Unlike violent offenders, fraudsters did not show differences in alpha activity of the dlPFC between truthful and deceptive responses, suggesting that fraudsters are better at emotion regulation while deceiving their opponents.

This study emphasizes the recruitment of emotion regulation processes during deception. The results give first insight into the emotional processes underlying deception in fraudsters.