There’s something about a classroom that opens my mind and fills me with optimism. It’s right in that moment when people realise they’re allowed to slow down and think. Its a safe space to question assumptions and explore why things happen, not just how to respond when they already have. That’s why, years after leaving Lancaster University, and being lucky enough to work alongside banks, regulators, investigators, communications, and policy teams, teaching still feels like home. And why it’s been such a pleasure to take this work back into the classroom again – this time with global fraud and financial crime teams.

Fraud is usually framed as a technical problem. Better controls. Faster alerts. Smarter systems. Those things matter, of course they do. But they only ever tell part of the story. The rest of the story is human – and that’s where criminology earns its keep.

In my most recent session, we start from a simple premise: financial crime doesn’t emerge from nowhere. It emerges where pressure, opportunity and rationalisation collide. Yes, that idea goes way back to the 1950s Donald Cressey’s Fraud Triangle (do not yawn), but it remains painfully relevant today, well maybe with a little more of a digital update! When people are under strain (including the strain that emerging technology such as generative AI), when systems create gaps, and when narratives make harm feel justifiable, crime becomes possible – sometimes even for people who never imagined themselves crossing that line.

Rather than teaching fraud as a list of typologies or red flags, I’ll invite participants to step inside different offender mindsets. Not to empathise in a sentimental way, but to understand structure, motivation and behaviour. We work through four archetypes: the organised social engineer, the opportunist under pressure, the recruiter who exploits people rather than systems, and the insider who becomes risky through silence and shame. Each sits differently within criminological theory, and each leaves different fingerprints on an organisation .

What quickly becomes clear is that “the fraudster” is not a single thing. Some actors are highly strategic, professionalised and optimisation-driven. Others are reactive, stressed, and operating with severe tunnel vision. Treating them as interchangeable leads to blunt controls that miss early signals and often create new vulnerabilities elsewhere.

We then flip the lens. Instead of asking “how would a criminal attack?”, we ask “what does a normal bank look like from the inside?” The (fictional) case study Bank we examine isn’t a failing institution. It’s a realistic one: trusted by customers, growing fast, under pressure, siloed in places, caring but stretched. When students map attacks onto that environment, the insight isn’t about exotic criminal genius. It’s about everyday human dynamics workload spikes, predictable scripts, moments of customer panic, staff reluctance to disclose stress.

This is where rational choice theory becomes useful, not as a claim that people are coldly logical, but as a reminder that decisions always make sense to the person making them in that moment. When fear is high, shame is present, or urgency is engineered, behaviour changes. Fraudsters design for that. They don’t break systems; they work through people.

One of the more unique parts of the day focuses on victims of social engineering. Not as passive recipients of harm, but as people guided through a deliberate psychological sequence: attention narrowing, emotion escalating, trust forming, urgency intensifying, and support being cut off. By the time money moves, the victim isn’t “being foolish”; they’re operating from a very different cognitive state. Understanding that changes how banks investigate, how they communicate, and how harm can be interrupted earlier.

What I love about teaching is watching experienced professionals reconnect with curiosity. Seeing fraud not just as compliance or loss, but as a form of human behaviour shaped by context. When that shift happens, prevention stops being purely reactive. It becomes about design: reducing strain, closing illegitimate opportunities, treating culture and wellbeing as controls, and building systems that work with real human behaviour rather than idealised models.

That, for me, is why the classroom still matters. It’s one of the few spaces where we can step back from dashboards and deadlines and ask better questions. And when we do that together, across teams, countries and disciplines, we don’t just get better at catching fraud. We get better at understanding the conditions that allow it to exist in the first place.

Reducing the harm of financial crime is a whole society project – understanding is where prevention really begins.