CLDG (Week 7): Fraud’s New Directions

What is ‘fraud’?  Despite its current social, political and legal significance, ‘fraud’ is under-theorised in criminal law literature and policy documents. Up to now attention has almost exclusively been on broadly identifying fraud’s core norms, tracking the approach taken in the Fraud Act 2006.  There has not been detailed interrogation of these norms within their surrounding normative context. This article addresses this gap in the literature, arguing that fraud’s core norms are being shaped in at least two ways by the structural aspects of the digital economy.  I explain why this more nuanced normative account of fraud for the criminal law matters, including the light it sheds on the values fraud uses and threatens.