The origins and relevance of Cressey’s Fraud Triangle

Peter Tickneris a freelance consultant, fraud investigator and academic as well as the author of a number of books on fraud investigation. He was director of internal audit for the Metropolitan Police Service in the UK from 1995 to 2009. Peter has recently obtained a doctorate at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Criminal Justice Studies around his methodology for investigating fraud in the public sector. This article on the origins of the Cressey Fraud Triangle has also appeared in the Public Sector Counter Fraud Journal, July 2021, and is summarised from an academic paper written by Dr Peter Tickner and Professor Mark Button [5].

Fraud investigators are used to situations not necessarily being what they seem. But have they ever probed tenets of their own training – such as how the well-known theory of three core drivers behind fraud was developed? Peter Tickner examines the formation and utility of the Fraud Triangle.