Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope on Scams, Stories & Secrets

Why drives people to commit fraud? What turns people into whistleblowers? How does fraud impact victims? On this episode, I'm exploring the scams, stories and secrets behind fraud.

My guest is Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope. She's the Dr. Barry Jay Epstein Endowed Professor of Forensic Accounting at DePaul University in Chicago and a nationally recognized expert in risk, forensic accounting, and white-collar crime research.

Her expertise lies in understanding and identifying financial fraud risk within financial statements assessing corporate culture and compliance systems designed to confront internal control challenges.

She’s also the author of a new book called ‘Fool Me Once’, a book that, in her words, "explores what makes perpetrators tick, victims so gullible, and whistleblowers so morally righteous".

It also forces the person reading it to consider their own behaviour because, as Kelly highlights, we are all capable of committing fraud.

In our discussion, we explore:

• how she became interested in fraud and the human factors behind it;
• why people commit fraud and the fact that we are all capable of fraud
• what drives whistleblowers and how not all whistleblowers have the same motivation;
• the impact on victims of fraud;
• how story-telling can help to reduce fraud and make people more aware of it;
• the importance of catching small incidents of fraud to prevent larger ones;
• how technology enables — and helps prevent — fraud;
• whether fraud is always a bad thing