Wired differently

Robert Hunter may be contacted on tel: +44 (0) 20 7330 3772, email robert.hunter@allenovery.com. Reporting by Timon Molloy.

All in the mind

“The serious fraudster will often seek to imply that the victim would appear stupid if he asked for an explanation of anomalies in the fraudster’s sales patter,” Robert Hunter of Allen & Overy LLP, widely regarded as the UK’s leading solicitor in the field of civil fraud, warned delegates to C5 Euro Legal’s recent Fraud & Asset Tracing & Recovery conference. Use of obfuscating industry jargon is a favourite ploy; individual terms that sound impressive may serve simply to ornament a meaningless sentence. The hearer may not understand what is said but be too embarrassed to admit it. Fraudsters will play on such diffidence and the disinclination to question a confident person’s knowledge. They are also adept at sympathy plays. Hunter listed a whole series of illness excuses for not cooperating that fraudsters had given him over the last two years: they ranged from the man who said that his wife was suffering from a psychiatric condition and would kill herself if the claim was pursued through the heart attack brought on by the stress of litigation, severe injury in a fall, a father in a coma, a couple of cases of cancer – always popular - to the more off-beat – in one instance a man said that he was a virtual prisoner and on the instructions of Interpol was unable to assist. The challenge, Hunter said, is to deal with defendants like this in a way that is not dismissive but “firm and fair” just in case what they assert is true. Claims of stress related conditions caused by the litigation are particularly common, Hunter said. Psychiatrists are often not as conscious as they might be of the risk that their opinions are being dishonestly procured. Crucial to a psychologist or psychiatrist gaining a patient’s trust is the feeling that he is not being morally judged and that what he says is being trusted to be true. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not. “The approach taken in psychiatric and medical interviews is rarely a forensic one” said Hunter, who has a degree in psychology.