The creation of trust and deception regarding fraud. An interactionistic study.

• Applicant: Dr. Christian Thiel
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 324631676

The research project explores the phenomenon of criminal fraud from a sociological perspective. It focuses on common and widely used 'scams and schemes'. These scams and schemes address choreographed procedures, through which people are deceived to trustfully grant someone access to their individual assets. Many of these scams are being used successfully for a long time. They are proven and convincing forms of deception. This makes them an interesting research topic for exploring two understudied aspects of this phenomenon: First to look into the question of how trust and deception are created when scams are executed in concrete interactions and second to pursue the matter of how fraudsters acquire the necessary knowledge to do so and how this knowledge is shaped and transferred. These issues are investigated in a qualitative study in the course of which explorative interviews, with actors involved in fraudulent activities as 'offenders', as 'victims' and as 'police investigators', are conducted. This data will be supplemented with document analyses of criminal files. The research project focusses on typical scams like fake credit lines and loans, investment fraud, rip-deal, grandparent scam and romance scam. By analyzing these different scams, basic aspects of fraudulent interactions and fraud-knowledge can be elaborated. Moreover this reveals the basic phenomenon of how trust and deception are created in daily life interactions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants