ABSTRACT
Fraud crime hinges on the careful and illicit manipulation of the symbolic. Hence, this chapter will explore fraud as a social construction and in doing so will illustrate how qualitative methodology rooted in phenomenology is particularly suited to the study of this crime. Brief examples will be given of the experience of private citizen victims at the hands of fraudsters who use interpersonal skills, relationships and material artefacts to gain and then breach the trust of private citizens (for a more extensive account of the vast range of fraud activity and the various ingenious methods deployed to fleece individual citizens and organisations, see Punch, 1996). By using and abusing the cues and gestures of expected interaction, fraud crime does not simply injure the victim but damages the very fabric of the everyday world, which is based upon our assumption that people and events are generally what they appear to be. It is here that fraud becomes a unique and wholly appropriate topic for qualitative research, as it is this methodology that is best suited to grasp the subtle world of identity, meaning and process which fraudsters bring to a more self conscious level in order to exploit the motives and interests of others. This chapter will therefore attempt to grasp fraud crime through the generalising medium of the phenomenal and in doing so will locate its special character around the corruption of trust. First, the notion of trust will be outlined as an ethical and practical imperative of social and economic activity. Secondly we introduce trust in relation to a constructivist methodology. Thirdly, we consider the methods most appropriate to exploring fraud crime with private citizen victims and lastly we provide extracts from interviews to illuminate the ways in which fraud crime injures the trust and the self-esteem of victims.
