Teaching fraud in higher education: Challenging myths through practitioner-academic autoethnography

This article examines persistent misconceptions surrounding fraud and considers how these narratives are encountered, reproduced and challenged within educational settings. Fraud is frequently trivialised, while responsibility for victimisation is often attributed to individual carelessness or incompetence. Practitioners’ understandings may additionally be shaped by organisational pressures, regulatory expectations and simplified risk frameworks. Drawing on a practitioner–academic autoethnographic analysis of five years of teaching university students and industry professionals, the study examines a corpus comprising contemporaneous teaching notes, reflective logbook entries and retrospective analytical reflections. Reconstructed composite vignettes are used to illustrate recurring forms of reasoning but are not presented as verbatim learner accounts. The analysis suggests that fraud misconceptions are not simply knowledge deficits; they are culturally and institutionally embedded narratives that influence how learners interpret evidence, responsibility and professional competence. It identifies pedagogical disruption as a process through which contradictory evidence, cases and experiential activities may destabilise these assumptions, while recognising that disruption may also generate resistance rather than transformation. These insights inform the Fraud Pedagogy Disruption Framework, a fraud-specific integration of critical pedagogy, transformative learning and experiential learning comprising four recursive stages: pre-existing fraud narratives, pedagogical disruption, reflective reconstruction and translation into practice. Evidence for reconstruction and sustained application remains provisional, and the framework identifies these outcomes as priorities for future empirical evaluation.