The Language of Fraud Cases

In a number of criminal law cases, defendants are accused of using language to defraud. The evidence often provides analyzable language that provides clues to the ways that the alleged fraud took place, but in some cases linguistic analysis can show some or all of the accusations to be unjustified. This book describes eight types of fraud cases growing out of the complex laws regulating commercial businesses and individuals in which defendants were accused of fraudulently failing to follow federal requirements relating to carrying out government contracts, resource conservation, corrupt foreign business practice, buying or selling trade secrets, money laundering, securities sales, price-fixing, and insurance contracts. The book includes chapters illustrating each of these types of alleged fraud and describes how linguistic analysis was used to help determine whether fraudulent language existed and how the government investigators believed the fraud was accomplished. Prosecutions in these eight cases were based on the defendants’ alleged intentional, knowing, and willful uses of fraudulent language to achieve financial gain. Linguistic analysis helped defense lawyers achieve favorable results in three cases and partially successful results in three others. The analysis did what it could in the other two cases, but could only go as far as the language evidence permitted. The analytical methodology used is described in detail for each case, beginning with the need to identify the participants’ speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, and conversational strategies, all of which contextualized what the government believed to be the smoking gun evidence of fraud.