Professional Jargon and Uncensored Street Slang

Fraud in Other Words 

HOODWINK 

To deceive, delude, or influence by slyness. Hoodwink is derived from wink, meaning to briefly close an eye. In the 16th century, it was fashionable to wear a head covering of a cowl or hood attached to a cloak. A wearer became hoodwinked or blinded when the hood unintentionally fell over the person's eyes. The situation made the wearer vulnerable. A thief could intentionally pull a hood down over a victim's eyes and then snatch his or her purse, leaving the victim groping about for the perpetrator and the stolen valuables.

In other situations, a nearly-closed hood could conceal the wearer's identity and be used to intentionally deceive other people.

Today, a fraudster might hoodwink his victims by concealing his true motives and feigning good intentions while a scam continues. The fraudster might mislead the victims to believe an untruth. Organizations or consumers might allege they have been hoodwinked out of thousands of dollars. However, victims are more likely to be blinded by their own greed than a cloth hood.

In Elizabethan times, children played the "hoodwinke game" that is known today as "blind man's buff (or bluff)." One child is blindfolded and then the other players scatter around to avoid detection. The blindfolded person wanders around trying to find and tag another player. To deceive or tease the blindfolded person, some players make distracting noises as they move about or give the person a disorienting small push called a buff.¹  

SLEIPNIR 

Sleipnir is an analytical technique developed to uniformly rank organized groups of criminals by their relative capabilities, limitations, and vulnerabilities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) use the rankings to recommend intelligence and enforcement priorities. This threat measurement technique was developed by the Criminal Intelligence Program (CIP) of the RCMP and adopted in 1999. The RCMP uses two versions of Sleipnir. Version one is the "Long Matrix for Organized Crime." Version two has different threat assessment criteria for terrorist organizations. Sleipnir is used in Australia and Europe too.

RCMP experts evaluate the threat of each criminal organization to Canadian society by ranking each organization based on 19 defined and weighted attributes. The experts can compare each criminal organization for threat changes from year to year and to other organizations. From the highest to the lowest, this is the relative importance of the attributes: (1) corruption, (2) violence, (3) infiltration, (4) expertise, (5) sophistication, (6) subversion, (7) strategy, (8) discipline, (9) insulation, (10) intelligence use, (11) multiple enterprises, (12) mobility, (13) stability, (14) scope, (15) monopoly, (16) group cohesiveness, (17) continuity, (18) links to other organized crime groups, and (19) links to criminal extremist groups.

Each project conducted at RCMP headquarters has a randomly selected name that starts with the letter "s." Sleipnir was a magical eight-legged gray colt -- a gift to Odin, the chief god in Norse mythology. The horse was the swiftest on earth and could bear Odin over the sea and through the air. Sleipnir's name means smooth or gliding, and is related to the English word slippery.²  

Canada's Criminal Intelligence Service identified 950 organized crime groups operating in Canada in 2007, compared to 800 groups in 2006. The increase could be attributed to law enforcement working together better to identify crime groups. Eighty percent of the crime groups are involved in marketing illicit drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and methamphetamine. Organized crime also is involved in financial crime such as identity theft, mass marketing fraud (telemarketing), mortgage fraud, securities fraud, payment card fraud, money laundering, human smuggling, intellectual property theft, counterfeit software, and vehicle theft.³  

A few criminal groups mount elaborate operations. They are hard to detect and run their operations in multiple urban centers. Criminal leaders coerce or employ legitimate business people, lawyers, and accountants to help them.

Larry C. Adams, CFE, CPA, CIA, CISA, teaches fraud examination, criminology and ethics at the Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry University in Phoenix, Ariz.  

References 

1. Charles Earle Funk and Charles Earle Funk, Jr., "Horsefeathers & Other Curious Words," Perennial Library, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1986, page 96.

2. Steven J. Strang, Project Sleipnir: An Analytical Technique for Operational Priority Setting, retrieved Sept. 2, 2007.

3. "2007 Annual Report: Organized Crime in Canada," July 6, 2007.

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