Considering fraud that occurs in the background

Niccolo Machiavelli, the person from whose name the term Machiavellian is derived, is one of those individuals who observed human nature with great patience and in great depth in many cases. Unlike the perception that many have of him being a scoundrel of the worst sort, he was a philosopher who saw human nature as it was at the time when it came to politics. Background fraud is often Machiavellian in nature. It has an “ends justifies the means” view of the world and can be utterly immoral in its approach to obtaining some goal through the use of deception. In other words, yelling that something isn’t fair is unlikely to garner any sort of response in this situation. The following sections define the kinds of background fraud and how to detect it.

Detecting fraud that occurs when you’re not looking

There are many different definitions for the difference between background, or long-term, fraud and real...