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Fraud as Legitimate Retribution for Colonial Injustice: Neutralization Techniques in Interviews with Police and Online Romance Fraud Offenders

Suleman Lazarus ; Mariata Hughes ; Mark Button ; Kaina Habila Garba (2025) — Deviant Behavior

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DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2024.2446328 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   United Kingdom
Tags:   Colonial Legacies, Cybercrime, Ghana, Neutralization Theory, Offender Interviews, Police Corruption, Romance Scams, Sakawa
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Synopsis

            
This catalog-style study investigates the rhetorical framing surrounding fraud as a form of legitimate retribution for colonial injustice. The analysis situates online romance fraud and related encounters with law enforcement within a wider discourse of grievance and historical accountability. Drawing on interviews with individuals involved in fraud and with police personnel, the work traces how narratives of colonial harm are mobilized to justify illicit acts and to reinterpret personal responsibility. The account treats fraud not only as technique but as a communicative act embedded in broader cultural scripts about justice, injury, and restitution, examined through the lens of deviant behavior theory. A core focus is the application of neutralization techniques—patterns of rationalization and escalation that allow individuals to deflect blame and frame harm as remedial rather than criminal. The study identifies recurrent moves such as appeals to higher loyalties, denial of injury, and claims of moral imperative, and considers how these articulations surface in police interviews and in the online presentation of schemes. The analysis evaluates how such rationalizations interact with perceptions of colonial history and with policing practices, shaping both offender self-conception and investigative responses. Findings are presented in a neutral, catalog-like manner, emphasizing conceptual themes rather than prescriptive conclusions. The work speaks to debates in criminology about the ways grievance narratives intersect with deviant behavior, the functions of justification in criminal activity, and the role of interview discourse in shaping understanding of fraud. It offers a reference for scholars and practitioners seeking to parse how legitimate-retribution frames emerge in cases linking colonial injustice to contemporary fraud.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
Prior research has largely focused on victims, leaving limited understanding of perpetrators’ motivations, rationalizations, ideologies, and operational perspectives, especially in Ghana and West African fraud hotspots. Direct offender testimonies are scarce relative to police accounts. The paper also identifies an under-researched question of whether anti-fraud infrastructures use rationalizations similar to offenders to justify inaction.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
Qualitative study in Accra, Ghana using semi-structured interviews with 13 active male internet scammers and two male law-enforcement officers, plus a three-officer focus group. Scammers were recruited through internet-café service-provider referrals; officers through snowball sampling. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed following Braun and Clarke’s framework. One researcher coded the dataset and a second independently reviewed part of it; discrepancies were resolved collaboratively. The analysis applied neutralization theory.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
Internet-café referral recruitment may have excluded scammers operating through mobile phones or outside café settings, potentially biasing the sample. The qualitative, Ghana-specific design does not support broad generalization. Although local languages and rapport were used, cultural nuance and gender dynamics may have shaped responses: all participants were men and the interviewer was a Ghanaian woman, potentially encouraging socially desirable accounts. The small police sample also limited the range of policing perspectives.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Examine how historical and cultural narratives shape criminal motivations across varied global contexts, including non-Western regions. Research should also investigate psychological and social impacts on offenders and victims, and how colonial-reparation narratives normalize and rationalize romance fraud.

          

              

    
    

        
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