Crimes against Words

All day, while I work, the radio hums in the background. Between the news bulletins and the songs come the adverts and lately, I keep hearing the same refrain. Law firms proclaiming, “If you fell victim to a scam, we’ll get your money back”.

Let’s park, for a moment, the ethics of their pitch. They aren’t getting anyone’s money back. The reality is that banks are being forced by regulation, not litigation, to dig deep and make customers whole. But what jars even more than the spin is the language. “Fell victim to a scam”.

And this is coming from law firms. Institutions built on the precision of language. Professionals who know that in criminal law, fraud is not a slip or a stumble but a deliberate act against another person. If anyone should avoid language that blurs victimisation into clumsiness, it is them. Yet here they are, reinforcing a phrase that quietly shifts blame from perpetrator to victim.

Fraud is not something people “fall” into. Fraud is something done to them. To pretend otherwise is not just sloppy expression. It is a crime against words.

“Faud is not something people fall into. Fraud is something done to them.”

Fraud, Scams, and the Weight of Words

Here’s where clarity matters. Fraud is the legal offence: intentional deception for financial or personal gain, set out in the UK’s Fraud Act 2006. It includes making false representations, failing to disclose information, or abusing a position of trust.

Scams are a type of fraud, but not the whole picture. A scam is a con: a set-up that persuades someone to act against their own interests. The victim is manipulated into transferring money, sharing details, or “investing” in something they otherwise never would have touched.

“All scams are fraud, but not all frauds are scams. A scam is a con; fraud is the crime.”

A false loan application or misrepresenting company accounts is fraud, but most people wouldn’t call it a scam.

That difference matters. Calling fraud “just a scam” can trivialise the seriousness of the crime. “Scam” sounds almost cheeky, the stuff of hustlers and tricksters. “Fraud” carries the legal and moral weight it deserves. When banks, regulators, media, or law firms blur these terms, they commit another crime against words: they make the offence sound smaller than it is.

Fraud as a Crime of Trust

Fraud is unique among crimes because it does not rely on physical force, but on the exploitation of trust. It is not merely the unlawful transfer of money but the weaponisation of our most basic social instincts: to believe, to cooperate, to respect authority, to act quickly in emergencies (Gambetta, 2009).

Fraudsters are not opportunists stumbling on chance victims. They are skilled manipulators, deploying tactics of persuasion, coercion, and deceit to override rational resistance (Button & Cross, 2017). Research into social engineering shows how fraudsters exploit deep cognitive heuristics, the mental shortcuts we all rely upon for efficient decision-making (Cialdini, 2007). These include:

· Authority (“This is your bank calling, you must act now”),

· Urgency (“Your account will be locked unless you transfer immediately”),

· Scarcity (“Only a few people have this investment opportunity”),

· Reciprocity (“I’ve done you a favour, now you can help me”).

Every one of us is vulnerable to these techniques because they are features of how humans cooperate. To dismiss victims as having “fallen for it” is to erase the deliberate asymmetry of power at play. It is another crime against words, one that hides the reality of exploitation behind a veneer of clumsiness.

The Consequences of Mis-Framing

This linguistic distortion has real-world consequences. Victims often feel humiliated and reluctant to report fraud for fear of being judged as foolish (Levi, Doig & Gundur, 2017). Shame compounds the harm. Money is lost, trust in society is shaken, and self-blame gnaws at mental health. Research by Whitty & Buchanan (2016) shows fraud victims frequently suffer depression, anxiety, and in some cases post-traumatic stress.

Media narratives reinforce this stigma. Headlines talk about people being “duped”, “fooled”, or “tricked”, rather than acknowledging that they were robbed. Even consumer advice sometimes frames fraud as a test of cleverness with narratives of “if you’re smart enough, you’ll avoid it”. But this is language doing violence. It shifts attention from the criminal act to the supposed gullibility of the victim, exactly the wrong moral emphasis.

Policy has not been immune. For years, banks justified non-reimbursement by citing “consumer responsibility”and “gross negligence”, leaning on the idea that victims had been careless. The burden of proof lay on the person harmed, not the institution or perpetrator. It took sustained pressure from campaigners and regulators, culminating in the UK Payment Systems Regulator mandating reimbursement for APP fraud in order to force a shift back toward recognising fraud as a crime against individuals rather than a consumer mistake.

Why Crimes Against Words Matter

The way we talk about fraud is not just semantics; it shapes law, policy, and public empathy. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) demonstrated that metaphors and frames structure moral reasoning. If fraud is framed as a kind of clumsy misstep (“falling for it”), then remedies will focus on teaching people not to stumble: more consumer education, sharper warnings, better scam-awareness campaigns. All valuable, but insufficient.

If instead fraud is framed as theft-like or as an assault on trust, a deliberate harm imposed upon victims, then the moral logic shifts. Responsibility lies squarely with perpetrators and with the institutions whose systems are exploited. Remedies become systemic. We see better fraud detection, liability-sharing across banks, harsher penalties for offenders, and proactive support for victims.

Language that obscures crime is not harmless. It becomes a crime against words, eroding our ability to see reality clearly, to allocate responsibility fairly, and to protect the vulnerable effectively.

Reframing Fraud

So, what would a just language of fraud look like? At minimum:

• Fraud is theft-like. It should be reported and understood as a serious crime, not as an embarrassing mishap.

• Victims are subjected to fraud. They do not “fall” into it.

• Fraud is perpetrated, not stumbled into. Fraudsters commit crimes; people don’t “let” themselves be defrauded.

• Stop calling fraud “just a scam.” Scams are tricks; fraud is a crime. The language we use must reflect the harm that is done.

Some fraud SMEs will rightly note that fraud is not the same as theft in law. Consent, however manipulated, makes it a separate offence under the Fraud Act 2006. But morally, the effect is indistinguishable. Money is gone. Trust is broken. Lives are damaged. To a victim, this is no less than being robbed.

This reframing is not semantic pedantry. It is a moral correction. By changing the language, we change the social script from one of embarrassment to one of rightful indignation; from shame to justice; from blaming individuals to demanding systemic accountability.

Crimes Against Words and the Moral Universe

Fraud is not clumsiness. It is not gullibility. It is a crime, one that corrodes trust, undermines democracy, and shatters lives. If we are to live in a moral universe that recognises harm with clarity, we must start with the words we use.

Because words are not neutral. They tilt the scales of justice. And when we say people “fell for fraud”, we tip those scales against victims. We obscure the crime, excusing the criminal, and deepen the wound. That is what happens when language is allowed to betray truth. These are crimes against words.

“When words betray the truth, they betray justice too.”

The Moral Universe Trilogy

Crimes Against Words is the third in a series of essays exploring how fraud undermines the moral universe we inhabit.

In Deepfake Democracy, the focus was on technology. It traced how political and financial discourse has historically framed fraud, first as a moral failing, then as a regulatory gap, and now as a technological arms race. At its sharpest edge, deepfakes and synthetic media don’t just deceive banks or investors; they corrode trust in our very senses. When reality itself can be faked, fraud becomes an epistemic threat.

In The Trust Loophole, the concern was institutional. It examined the way legality has displaced morality, leaving compliance frameworks to masquerade as integrity. From PPE procurement scandals to crypto collapses, the pattern is the same: deception justified as long as no explicit rule was broken. This marks a deeper erosion, not of laws, but of the moral norms that make trust sustainable.

Now, with Crimes Against Words, the lens turns to language. If technology scrambles what we can see, and institutions blur what we can rely on, then language itself distorts how we make sense of crime and responsibility. When victims are said to have “fallen for” fraud, when fraud is softened into “just a scam”, the harm is minimised and the blame shifted. Words, too, can betray.