ABSTRACT
The sheer scale of fraud and cyber fraud victimisation, with millions of people falling victim globally and even more being targeted each year, poses significant challenges for the law enforcement community. As was shown in the previous chapter they do not have enough resources to investigate the vast majority of these frauds. Prevention, therefore, becomes very important. Indeed, there is also the duty that befalls individuals, organisations and official bodies to develop effective strategies to prevent fraud and attempt to substantially reduce the level of victimisation. Mainstream property crime has been targeted with many preventative techniques rooted in criminological theory, and there is a corresponding body of research to justify and evaluate such initiatives. However, fraud prevention as an academic subject is much less advanced, although it is important to note that there are many fraud prevention tools used by individuals and organisations. This chapter will seek to build upon the body of knowledge on crime prevention in general, particularly the 25 techniques of situational crime prevention advocated by Clarke (2005) to identify a variety of fraud prevention tools which are regularly used. Unfortunately, because of the lack of research in this area, there is not a great deal of literature to assess how effective some of these tools are. However, this chapter will attempt to provide one of the first broad attempts to identify a wide variety of tools under the five main sub-headings used by Clarke (2005): increasing the effort, increasing the risks, reducing the rewards, reducing provocations and removing excuses. While the chapter focuses heavily on situational crime prevention techniques as they can apply to cyber frauds and scams, it will also offer a discussion on the perceived differences/similarities between crime that occurs across both offline and online environments to determine the suitability of existing prevention theory in this new sphere. Before we embark upon this, however, the chapter will first examine crime prevention in general.
