The Psychology and Sociology of Fraud - Essay Example

“Criminal opportunities are presented by those vulnerable environments and opportunistically interpretable scenarios that individuals and groups see as offering the attractive potential for the criminal reward with little apparent risk of detection or penalty” (Ramamoorti 524).

There is a wide range of characteristics of a prospective fraud perpetrator. Prospective fraud perpetrators tend to seek more knowledge and awareness about different matters that they are not seemingly so related to. Prospective fraud perpetrators tend to study the history of an organization and find out about other people who have committed frauds in the past, how they did it, and what was their fate. Fraud perpetrators are suspicious. They may be unnecessarily too friendly and chatty or be excessively silent and socially excluded.

Prospective fraud perpetrators are interested in crime stories and movies because they happen to learn a lot of new strategies and techniques to commit fraud in such forms of literature. Prospective fraud perpetrators exaggerate others’ small mistakes and are smart enough to hold others responsible for inappropriate or wrong things that they have themselves done. Prospective fraud perpetrators keep an eye on the latest technology and have a tendency to develop skills and competency in the use of new software and technology sooner and quicker than others. Prospective fraud perpetrators often have large networks and channels that they use to commit the fraud.

The personality of a fraud perpetrator is predicted. Certain behaviors are commonly found among fraud perpetrators. These behaviors include but are not limited to lying, untrustworthiness, dishonesty, and excessive promising. Certain personality traits typical of fraud perpetrators are verbosity, emotional intelligence, and a high level of intelligence in general. Fraud perpetrators can be predicted to have familial problems starting early in their life including illegitimate birth, single parent raising, distorted or merged families, and sexual abuse. It is noteworthy here that while these behaviors, qualities, personality traits, and life events can be predicted about a known fraud perpetrator, all people having these behaviors, personality traits, or similar life histories are not necessarily fraud perpetrators. So a person having these qualities or behaviors cannot be predicted to be a fraud perpetrator.