Scripting mortgage fraud for the motion picture: “Fraud and its interrelationship with the financial services sector in the UK”

Abstract

This article examines how mortgage fraud is organised in the United Kingdom, what the crime-commissioning processes are for its occurrence and what exogenous conditions and influences support its existence and its capacity to reproduce. The article aims to extend understanding beyond the micro-individual-level, such as causal agency, 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 research 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 sociological inquiry that employs Clegg’s circuits of power theory 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. 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.