This thesis concerns the collapse of Houston based Enron Corporation and its ongoing economic, political and legal implications. Specifically, I investigate spaces of corporate fraud to broadly ask, how is fraud located in the varied spatial contexts of the firm? My goal is to demonstrate that the corporation is contingent upon social, cultural and material relationships across space. In this regard, I explore three distinct corporate spaces. They include (1) financial statements, where I discuss Enron’s financial performances in two spatial contexts, what the public saw, and what went on in private, (2) the bodies of workers, where I consider the gendered exposure of Enron’s fraud to the public, and (3) the spaces of the courtroom where I document how the corporation, as a non-bodied entity, became embodied in a courtroom context. In each case, I demonstrate how fraud is situated differently, and in each case, I suggest the implications of corporate fraud play out with differing results for those involved. The research for this thesis involved an archeological and ethnographic approach towards gathering and analyzing narratives around Enron’s downfall. This means I rely on financial documents and other important papers published by the former company, semi-structured interviews with former Enron employees, interviews with key media persons documenting the Enron story, participant-observation of the criminal trial against former CEOs (Chief Executive Officer) Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, media analysis of news articles and other popular culture texts, and finally, journaling. Far from being solely a homo economicus, a rational economic actor guided by capitalist imperatives to extract profit, my data suggests that the corporation is constituted through cultural, social and material agents that are unstable and breakdown. With this, I suggest the use of a new metaphor for the corporation, the corporation as a body. The body I conceive is conceptually drawn from feminist post-structural theory. It is open, porous and embodied. This new metaphor enables me to draw on the corporation’s diverse embodiments as important constitutive moments of corporate fraud. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This thesis investigates fraud and the situation on Internet with e-commerce today, to point on some potential threats and needed countermeasures. The work reviews several state of the art e-fraud schemes, techniques used in the schemes and statistics on the extent of e-fraud. This part shows that e-frauds are today both sophisticated and widespread. Since real world frauds are deemed impossible to fully cover in order to predict potential new e-frauds, the thesis adopts a different approach. It suggests two abstraction models for fraud cases, a protocol model and a functional model. These are used to perform analysis on case studies on both telecom frauds and e-frauds. The analysis presents characteristics for both types of frauds. Using one of the abstraction models, the functional model, conceptually similar cases among telecom frauds as well as e-fraud cases are identified. The similar cases in each category are then compared, using the other abstraction model, the protocol model. The study shows that concepts from telecom frauds already exist in e-frauds. Several challenges and some possibilities in e-fraud prevention and detection are also extracted in the comparative study of the different categories. The major consequence of the challenges is e-frauds’ higher scalability compared to telecom frauds. Finally, this thesis covers several existing countermeasures in e-commerce along with specific countermeasures against auction fraud, phishing and spam. However, it is shown that these countermeasures do not address the challenges in e-fraud prevention and detection to a satisfactory extent. Therefore, this thesis proposes several high-level countermeasures in order to address the challenges.

This thesis complexly describes the crimes of fraud, insurance fraud, credit fraud and subsidy fraud as regulated by sections 209 to 212 of Act No. 40/2009 Coll. Penal Code. First the historical development of these crimes is described, both from the view of legislation and criminology. Further, the sources of the legislative regulation of these crimes are defined. Since fraud belongs in the category of property crimes, these are also discussed collectivelly, with emphasis on the individual common elements of the above-mentioned crimes. The above-mentioned crimes are each individually described with respect to their individual elements including the description of eventual problematic elements of the current legislation. In case of the special elements of these crimes the legislation regarding the respective contractual obligations is described. In addition to the above-described exposition a comparison with the crime of Act detrimental to the financial interests of the European Union is included. In the conclusion the current legislation is evaluated positively with the exception of the admonition regarding the casuictic legislative regulation of the special merits of these crimes including the question of sustainability of the current legislative state with respect to the technological and...

In broad terms — including a thief's use of existing credit card, bank, or other accounts — the number of identity fraud victims in the United States ranges 9-10 million per year, or roughly 4% of the US adult population. The average annual theft per stolen identity was estimated at $6,383 in 2006, up approximately 22% from $5,248 in 2003; an increase in estimated total theft from $53.2 billion in 2003 to $56.6 billion in 2006. About three million Americans each year fall victim to the worst kind of identity fraud: new account fraud. Names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and other data are acquired fraudulently from the issuing organization, or from the victim then these data are used to create fraudulent identity documents. In turn, these are presented to other organizations as evidence of identity, used to open new lines of credit, secure loans, “flip” property, or otherwise turn a profit in a victim's name. This is much more time consuming — and typically more costly — to repair than fraudulent use of existing accounts. This research borrows from well-established theoretical backgrounds, in an effort to answer the question – what is it that makes identity documents credible? Most importantly, identification of the components of credibility draws upon personal construct psychology, the underpinning for the repertory grid technique, a form of structured interviewing that arrives at a description of the interviewee’s constructs on a given topic, such as credibility of identity documents. This represents substantial contribution to theory, being the first research to use the repertory grid technique to elicit from experts, their mental constructs used to evaluate credibility of different types of identity documents reviewed in the course of opening new accounts. The research identified twenty-one characteristics, different ones of which are present on different types of identity documents. Expert evaluations of these documents in different scenarios suggest that visual characteristics are most important for a physical document, while authenticated personal data are most important for a digital document.

The thesis deals with insurance fraud on the Czech insurance market. The introductory section describes the actual state of the insurance market. Insurance fraud is presented in terms of legislation, their species and the general alarming indicators. The next section deals with internal fraud and depictures a brief profile of the typical internal fraudster, indicators of their suspicious behavior and ways of prevention. The following chapter describes the external fraud in the life and non-life insurance, and is supplemented by a separate chapter describing organized fraud. The following part is devoted to statistics of insurance fraud, both from the perspective of the Czech Republic as well as some European countries. The final section describes several fraud detection methods used by insurance companies. Finally, the author proposes certain ways of improving the efficiency of the fight against this crime.

During the last ten years, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of cases involving incidents of fraud in standby letters of credit. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effect of fraud on standby letters of credit transactions. This study principally deals with standby letters of credit issued under the 1983 Revision of the Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits, drafted by the International Chamber of Commerce, which is a set of internationally recognized rules for documentary credit operations. Due to the international character of letters of credit law, I have adopted a comparative approach that deals with materials from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany and Switzerland. This thesis will first show that there are two types of standby letters of credit, which have to be distinguished because they involve different obligations and risks for the parties. A device payable against the beneficiary's simple statement will be described as a "simple statement" standby credit, whereas a device payable against a set of documents will be called a "documentary" standby credit. The thesis will then demonstrate why the treatment of fraud should not be the same for "simple statement" standby credits and "documentary" standby credits. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

Purpose - To identify how auditors can incorporate unpredictability into their audit plan in order to comply with both US and international auditing standards on the prevention and detection of fraud. Design/methodology/approach - Review of auditing standards, fraud cases, and other audit literature. Findings - A cost-benefit model for evaluating unpredictability and 17 specific ways that auditors can incorporate unpredictability. Practical implications - This paper can be used by practicing auditors to develop ways to increase their compliance with professional standards. Originality/value - The paper fills avoid in the literature with respect to how auditors can be unpredictable as required by auditing standards.

This thesis critically assesses the scope and method of criminalisation of the concept of fraud under the Fraud Act 2006 through the discussion of an apparent ‘duality’ between (co-existing) criminal and non-criminal resolution mechanisms. The reader will find social sciences theory and mixed-methods research techniques being used to identify and characterise a dysfunction between legislation and the social function of fraud control and its resolution. The 2006 Act appears to present a categorical and monolithic headline offence of fraud qualified by dishonesty, yet it is not clear that the Act clearly identifies the scope of effective criminalisation with respect to fraud. The dishonesty-based conduct offence provided in the Fraud Act 2006 is examined in the context of contemporary theory and practical considerations that relate to the discipline of law-enforcement. This work investigates pre-industrial modes of fraud resolution and identifies industrial-era points of divergence between the concepts of fraud and theft (a similar headline offence defined and criminalised under the Theft Act 1968). The work also offers an empirical study of survey-based data collection involving one-hundred-and-forty participants (N=140). It measured the practical extent of criminalisation of fraud in terms of participant indications of the (typically) most likely official outcome in response to sixteen hypothetical examples of fraud offences. The survey results appear to support practical, contextual, and theoretical considerations from the literature on the inhibitors to the consistent application of a conduct-based general fraud offence. The data and findings highlight the advantages of detailed actus reus-based criminalisation of types of fraud that require additional control through effective criminalisation.

Thesis (LLM. (Development and Management) -- University of Limpopo, 2005

published_or_final_version / Criminology / Master / Master of Social Sciences