The organisation of mortgage fraud and its relationship to the governance, control and regulation of financial services in England and Wales

Gilbert, Jonathan

Abstract

This paper adopts a critical realist approach to examine how mortgage fraud is organised in England and Wales, what the crime-commissioning processes are for its occurrence and what exogenous conditions and influences support its existence and its capacity to reproduce. The study aims to extend understanding beyond the micro-individual-level, such as causal agency (i.e. those factors that influence the decision to offend), the biographies of actors and their social relations with one another; to a level of understanding that encompasses macro-structural and facilitative factors and conditions that exist in the financial services sector.

The strategy chosen to guide data collection utilises Layder’s adaptive theory (1998), where theoretical propositions concerning the commission and reproduction of mortgage fraud are subject to adaptation and refinement as a consequence of incoming evidence. This strategy is supported by a multiple case study design, which involves the cross-case analysis of three multi-million-pound mortgage fraud conspiracies.

The study combines criminology with convict criminology, and allies itself to an approach to sociological inquiry that employs Clegg’s circuits of power theory. This theory is used as a conceptual framework to examine how the roles and activities of fraudsters and key professional agents are otherwise supported by the convergence of dispositional and facilitative conditions and influences in the financial services sector. It is this circuit that supports the existence of mortgage fraud and its capacity to reproduce, or to be disrupted before it can reproduce.

Crime scripting is used as a means of transposing the circuits of power framework into criminological research, as the schema is representative of the interrelationship of the causal, dispositional and facilitative powers through which the organisation of mortgage fraud is possible.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Centre for Crime, Law and Justice
• Start Date: Feb 23, 2022
• Acceptance Date: Feb 14, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 9, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 11, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/12868115