Author: Edited by Prof Russell G Smith
ISBN No: 978 1 03534 881 7
Review date: 26/09/2026
No of pages: 472
Publisher: Edward Elgar
Publisher URL:
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/research-handbook-on-fraud-and-society-9781035348800.html
Year of publication: 01/09/2026
Brief:
price
£48 (ebook)
Whatever your interest in fraud, whether academic as a student or wanting to learn more as a counter-fraud specialist, or in some ascpect of the crime – how offenders do it, who their victims are, and likely tech developments – a Research Handbook on Fraud and Society is worth studying.
As the (Australian academic) editor sets out at the beginning, fraud has the most impact on economies and does most harm to individuals, a sign of how such crime at once hurts people emotionally (far from clean and โvictimlessโ, then) and puts up insurance premiums and adds to the cost of doing business, and perhaps pushes fragile businesses over the edge, meaning further impact. As the editor points out, itโs โoften a hidden crime and is hard to detectโ, and indeed may never be detected, making it harder to study and measure. That might go some way to explain why โsocieties seem to have tolerated this situation with equanimity as governments, businesses and individuals often see fraud as an inevitable risk of living and doing businessโ, and itโs relatively studied by academics in general and criminologists in particular, compared with more visible crimes.
Chapters
The chapters come from British, North American and Australian scholars, mainly. To touch on the British contributors, the independent researcher Janice Goldstraw-White has compared women and men who do occupational fraud. One of the doyens of fraud study in the UK, Prof Mark Button of the University of Portsmouth, and โpracademicโ former auditor Peter Tickner go into the โfraud triangleโ to explain offending (briefly, of motivation, opportunity and rationalisation, or put another way what drives someone to do it, the lack of controls allowing the crime, and how the criminal excuses their dishonesty, to themselves). With a typical light touch the veteran Cardiff academic Prof Michael Levi reviews โmy life in fraudโ, the study of and writing about it, that is.
Price
As for the price of the book, at more than ยฃ200 in print it may well be prohibitive, though far from outlandish for such collections. As a comparison, you can easily pay roughly that amount for a four-hour rail journey (perhaps the time it would take you to dip thoroughly into the volume?). If a student you may want to access it via your institution, which might well be digitally in any case. A possible alternative publication from last year would be Blackstone’s Counter Fraud Professional’s Handbook, that as the title suggests is more geared to the practical.
