Search results

The purpose of this paper is to report on a search of criminology and related databases to identify fraud prevention intervention projects that showed promising achievements in reducing offences.

A keyword search of Criminal Justice Abstracts was supplemented by searches of related databases and case study repositories – conducted up to 31 May 2019. The paper includes some attention to indicators of “what doesn’t work” as well as “what might work” or “what should work”. Selection criteria were open about evidence, rather than exclusively applying strict scientific standards.

Overall, the literature is marked by inferences regarding what should work, based on diagnostics about opportunity factors in fraud and victim characteristics. In terms of evaluated intervention projects, only two were identified that met best practice scientific standards. However, a further 17 projects were included where there was some evidence of a likely benefit.

Available evaluations of intervention projects are predominantly within-in group studies. Pre- and post-intervention time frames are often short, limited to one year or less; with only one follow-up study.

The findings demonstrate the need for applied experiments to build knowledge about effective fraud reduction strategies. The main lesson from the content of the 19 projects concerns the value of a situational crime prevention framework for designing and testing interventions, especially through enhancing rule setting, reducing anonymity, extending guardianship and formal surveillance, and facilitating compliance.

This appears to be the first systematic literature review of applied counter-fraud intervention projects.

The purpose of this paper, which is based on author's PhD study, is to analyze the trends in credit card fraud prevention in the USA, the UK, Australia and Indonesia, particularly over the period 2003‐2007, with special focus on the fraud prevention practices in the payments systems.

This study uses primary and secondary data particularly from the payments systems of the USA, the UK, Australia and Indonesia to conduct historical and benchmarking analyses to highlight the trends in credit card fraud prevention in the four countries.

The study establishes that a common approach in preventing credit card fraud is reducing offenders' opportunities to commit their offences, which often require significant amount of resources and thus sound strategy needs to be properly formulated and executed. Referring primarily to the practices in the USA, the UK, Australia and Indonesia, resources are mainly allocated to six key areas of fraud prevention: understanding of the real problems, fraud prevention policy, fraud awareness, technology‐based protection, identity management and legal deterrence. These are supported in principle by four main groups in a payments system: user, institution, network and government and industry.

The paper provides insights into the nature of credit card fraud, as well as a framework for designing a sound credit card fraud prevention strategy in a country's payments system.

This paper aims to discuss the findings of a UK-based research study that sought to explore the applicability of situational crime prevention towards money laundering undertaken through the purchasing of high-value portable commodities.

This paper presents exploratory findings from research conducted between 2011 and 2013 in the UK. The research sought to identify the process, steps and vulnerabilities behind money laundering through the purchasing of high-value portable commodities and whether the introduction of situational crime prevention techniques could reduce vulnerabilities in the existing environment.

Despite significant research into money laundering typologies, the use of high-value portable commodities has remained largely untouched, regardless of the increased implementation of anti-money laundering policies and procedures. This paper demonstrates how the purchasing of high-value portable commodities is extremely vulnerable to money laundering – while identifying how the successful application of situational crime prevention is possible – but inherently it depends on various characteristics directly and indirectly facilitating each stage of the money laundering process.

This paper is of value to government policymakers, regulators and financial institutions considering future preventative measures. It is also of value to financial investigators and law enforcement agencies intent on investigating money laundering. While the paper relies on data from the UK, the overall findings are such that wherever cash-intensive businesses exist, so too does the opportunity for money laundering through the financial arrangement retained by such businesses.

This paper presents new research on the direct link existing between high-value portable commodities and money laundering in the UK and the viability of techniques for situational crime prevention despite significant research having previously taken place to identify and develop money laundering typologies.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a conceptual as well as an empirical link between retail banks’ activities to protect their customers from third‐party fraud, the quality of customer relationships, and customer loyalty.

A conceptual framework is developed linking customer familiarity with and knowledge about fraud prevention measures, relationship quality, and customer loyalty. To empirically test the conceptual framework, data were collected in collaboration with a large German retail bank.

A positive association was found between customer familiarity with and knowledge about fraud prevention measures and the quality of customer relationships as measured by satisfaction, trust, and commitment. The quality of customer relationships, in turn, is positively associated with customer loyalty as measured by intentions to continue their relationship with and cross‐buy other products from their bank.

The paper focuses on the German retail banking market and uses data from only one bank. Future research may investigate the generalizability of the findings across other banks, as well as other countries. Moreover, future research could address how specific anti‐fraud instruments and their communication differentially affect customer satisfaction, trust, and commitment.

The results stress the importance of fraud prevention for retail banks and show that besides the financial objective of reducing operating costs, fraud prevention and its effective communication is a meaningful way to improve customer relationship quality and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

This is the first academic study to empirically examine the relationship between a retail bank's (communication about) fraud prevention mechanisms and the quality of their customer relationships.

This study aims to examine how auditors perceive the influence of crucial fraud prevention factors in deterring financial statement fraud within the corporate sector. Additionally, this research explores the mediating effect of fraud awareness in elucidating the impact of ethical leadership and internal control systems on preventing financial statement fraud.

The study used an online survey, targeting a sample of 141 professionally qualified auditors with at least one year of practical experience in the field. The researchers used “Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)” to examine relationships between latent variables using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The study investigated the impact of whistleblowing systems, fraud awareness, ethical leadership, internal control systems and corporate governance on fraud prevention.

This research finding provides evidence to the corporate sector by establishing the significance of fraud awareness as the most influencing factor in preventing financial statement fraud. Furthermore, the combined explanatory variables account for 77.4% of the overall variance in financial statement fraud prevention. The study reveals a partial mediation effect of fraud awareness on the relationship between the internal control system and financial statement fraud prevention.

This research finding may assist in developing an effective fraud prevention programme to mitigate fraud instances and improve financial reporting quality. In the corporate sector, each organisation should clearly specify the policies on whistleblowing systems, fraud awareness training, internal control systems and corporate governance. To foster a comprehensive fraud prevention programme, the leaders should enforce these policies with employee support.

This research integrated crucial elements to develop a new theoretical framework for investigating financial statement fraud prevention within the corporate context. Accordingly, this research framework provides a more in-depth explanation of preventing financial statement fraud from an auditor’s perspective. Additionally, this research is the first to explore the mediating role of fraud awareness in influencing the effectiveness of the internal control system in preventing financial statement fraud.

The paper aim at empirical examination of the predictors of the occupational fraud losses by drawing insights evolving fraud theoretical frameworks.

A survey of fraud professionals and witnesses in Tanzania was administered to collect data which profiled perpetrators, victims, losses and elements of financial pressure, opportunity, capability and rationalization. A total of 109 responses were analyzed through ordinary least squares regressions.

The study found that apart from organizational and individual level predictors, interactive fraud elements, incorporating situational factors and moderated by fraudster’s history have significant influence in explaining the magnitude of observed fraud losses.

The findings of this study have implications for researchers and managers in business in enhancing understanding of the predictors of the occupational fraud losses in general, and specifically in streamlining the efforts to prevent, detect and resolve fraud on timely basis so as to minimize the frequencies and magnitudes of occupational fraud losses.

The study provides unique insights through empirical analysis that draws predictors from both prior literature and existing fraud theoretical frameworks. Unlike other studies relative importance of each individual, organizational and situational factors including interaction effects of key variables, are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the use of disposition variables as determinants of fraudulent behaviours. It is hoped, it stimulates our critical understanding of psychological aetiology on individual’s intention to perpetrate partial fraud or to co-offend.

This study was developed as a reflection of empirical work conducted in Indonesia public sectors.

By suggesting the important process of individual’s cognitive reasoning, this study identifies that there is an overlooked process made by prior studies in terms of personality traits as a strong predictive power for individual’s intention to commit fraudulent behaviours or white-collar crimes. This study argues that they should not be independently predictive of fraud behaviours. This study acknowledges that in the prediction of social behaviours, whether fraudulent behaviours or not, there are no absolute answers to or analyses of it. However, it is instructive to consider social cognitive theory in elucidating the psychological pathways associated with fraudulent behaviours. This is because it can bridge an appropriate lens in positioning personalised behaviours as a predictor of perpetrating fraudulent behaviours. Then, this study does not have any serious concerns about how many antecedents influence behaviours of intention to perform wrongdoings. However, the functioning of individual cognitive reasoning should not be ignored. Both theoretical and managerial implications from this study are discussed to suggest alternative theories on causes of fraudulent behaviours.

This study uses social cognitive theory as a basis of analysis. Through a simple analysis, a different perspective of treating the antecedents of fraud has been proposed, so that it can be used to develop more effective intervention that can deter fraudulent behaviours within an organisation.

This study theoretically explores psychological mechanisms or pathways related to the functioning of individual’s reasoning. Then, this study proposes the critiques, in which it is intended to stimulate another research on deepening and broadening a theory of fraud. In short, this study importantly also offers recommendations and opportunities for future research and organisations to develop effective prevention that can deter fraudulent behaviours.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for an integrated explanation of financial fraud. Greater emphasis must be placed on the structural and situational factors that are the elements of fraud risks and fraud.

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the explanation of financial fraud. Both micro- and macro-theoretical explanations of fraud were analysed to allow for a broader picture of the types of individuals that were involved in fraud, the rules governing their conduct and the types of law they broke.

The main reason why people commit fraud is that their crime propensity interacts with the elements present in criminogenic environments. Indeed, because most of the research on structural theories of fraud focuses on general criminality, not much has been done in the area of financial fraud. More research needs to be carried out to excavate the subterranean cluster of narrative on fraud risks and fraud.

To address the future contingency of fraud risks, the paper adopted a similar position of prior accounting research on financial crimes. The structural explanation of fraudulent behaviour considers individuals’ actions to be less the result of individual deviance and more the cause of societal forces. Structural theories take into consideration the individual psychology of the offenders and position it to reflect the various realities – institutional, structural and cultural life – they are caught up in. Future research must endeavour to address these concerns.

The manuscript is among a new stream of literature that addresses the structural elements of financial fraud.

The purpose of this paper is to explore pathways to fraud perpetrated in accounting-related roles, focusing both on situationally driven attitudes and contextual elements.

Drawing on an anomie-based criminological taxonomy developed by Waring et al. (1995) and Weisburd and Waring (2001), which highlights individual attitudes and situational elements and their connection to illegitimate behaviour, the authors perform a qualitative content analysis of available media and court-reported information on a hand-collected database of 192 accountant frauds in Australia during the period 2001-2011.

The analysis highlights four distinct pathways to accountant fraud – crisis responders, opportunity takers, opportunity seekers and deviance seekers – and the relative distribution of identified cases among these pathways. It also identifies the prevalence of gambling, female offenders, small and medium enterprises as victims, as factors in fraud, as well as the relatively unsophisticated methods in much accountant fraud. In addition, it establishes the importance of situational attitude in moderating inherent character as it relates to fraudulent behaviour and the variable importance of the fraud triangle elements across the pathways to accountant fraud.

This paper provides direct evidence on the nature and pathways to accountant fraud, thus improving understanding of a significant category of occupational fraud. The evidence challenges conventional characterisations of accountant fraud offenders in prior research.

The purpose of this study is to provide theoretical guidance that enables local governments to deal with occupational fraud.

The quantitative approach is used to examine the efficacy of the Committee of Sponsoring Organisations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) internal control framework in tackling occupational fraud in local government. To achieve the goals, the authors performed a survey of the Indonesian auditor institutions.

It is not appropriate to argue that all types of local government fraud can be deterred by a single internal control. The study suggests that COSO internal controls are not effective for dealing with corruption cases. However, the authors do find the efficacy of those controls are obvious for controlling asset misappropriation and financial statement fraud. This result indicates that if the COSO internal control framework is only designed for routine financial control and asset protection, it significantly and negatively influences its efficacy to deal with occupational fraud. This study has both theoretical and managerial implications, discussed separately.

In the field of prevention, the authors cannot make generalised theories and approaches for dealing with occupational fraud. Whilst previous authors have offered fraud deterrents in terms of internal controls, they have failed to realise the need to understand their effectiveness for particular forms of fraud. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of internal controls in achieving their goals. This has both practical applications and stimulates theoretical insights.