Beside love, no human emotion is so useful in unseating sound judgment as greed, the root cause of all frauds.

Fraud means dishonesty and false representation being made knowingly or without belief in its truth or recklessly or carelessly whether it is true or false.

Fraud in its variety of forms tends to keep pace with technology. Many potentially fraudulent approaches are naive, patently obvious and therefore quite easy to identify. They are quite unrealistic in terms of practice and market. The only way one can overcome them is with the ability to identify whether a proposition is spurious or not and the best way to achieve this is with a working knowledge of how these fraudulent transactions are structured. However in practice it may not always be easy to discover a fraud.

There has undoubtedly been a development in the sophistication of fraudulent propositions as well as the variety and skill or confidence tricksters. We on hearing a proposition which we do not understand, will immediately recall that we do not know everything and wrongly assume that because the proposition does not make any sense to us, it is due to our own lack of knowledge.

The successful practitioner of spurious deal is said to be gifted with an instinctive understanding of human psychology. S/he will for example be unlikely to introduce himself/herself as a principal and in his/her alleged role of representative of agent and s/he will not disclose the identity of the principal except in most general terms.

Normally, fraudulent transactions involve huge amounts and the trickster will be unknown. There will be undue haste to complete a transaction, particularly a complicated one and there will be an over emphasis on maintaining secrecy.

The trickster will indulge in technical double talk in the first meeting itself and will be clearly at ease with large figures. This is often accompanied by impressive name dropping.

Moderan fraudsters send unsolicited spam emails on look alike straight forward and genuine propositions requesting for fiduciary or trust services. Experience has shown that such events have been taken as a relatively plausible excuse to obtain further correspondence which is then used to defraud gullible investors, usually in some other country often paid by way of advance.

There is no doubt that there has been a growth both in volume and sophistication of fraudulent approaches. Whilst retaining an awareness of spurious propositions it is essential that an appropriate perspective is maintained towards them.

People who are involved in fraud may also be involved in other forms of crime.

The best and simple way to overcome fraud is only through overcoming greed to make money without adequate efforts.