Hello and welcome to today's English lesson. My name is Stuart. In today's
lesson we're looking at words and vocabulary associated to the topic of
fraud and corruption let's go to the intro now as I said today's lesson is
looking at this topic here fraud and corruption and vocabulary words
expressions that we use in English to talk about this particular topic
now fraud and corruption are two problems let's say in a lot of countries
where companies politicians individuals commit fraud and corruption activities
to the detriment of society and other human beings so we're going to look at
words that we can use to talk about this topic in English because most likely if
you're living in a country where this is a problem it could come up in
conversation and you will need to know these types of words so the first thing
we're going to look at is the base words fraud and corruption so for example in
English you commit fraud okay you commit fraud you are corrupt or someone is
corrupt someone is a corrupt person you can carry out or commit fraudulent
activity and you can also be fraud okay so you can commit fraud or you can
defrauded or you can carry out fraudulent activity or basically if you
are corrupt or if somebody is corrupt now different types of corruption and
fraudulent activity could be false accounting false accounting where you
have accounting practices that are legal and accounting practices which are
illegal running at the same time parallel accounting system ok so
false accounting maybe it's insider trading where
somebody gets information about a company and invests in that company and
the stock price increases so you get insider trading match-fixing is a
problem nowadays as well when it comes to sport match-fixing on a football game
or a tennis match or a cricket game for example where the result is manipulated
this is known as match-fixing you maybe you lose your money in a pyramid scheme
somebody commits fraud with a pyramid scheme where you invest money in a type
of scheme and one day the money disappears and again the person
disappears that's a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme which is similar more or
less ten years ago in the States there was a famous Ponzi scheme with
Bernard Madoff okay that was an example of a Ponzi scheme with people invest
money trying to get a big return but the money disappears and tax evasion is a
common problem nowadays especially in Europe and the states as well companies
are avoiding tax individuals are moving their money to tax havens where they
don't have to pay as much tax as they would in their normal country so they
are trying to avoid tax or evade tax through tax evasion now are different
types of fraudulent activity we can have a scam okay a scam a scam is a type of
illegal activity where people end up losing money there's a scam maybe
there's some type of maybe somebody embezzled money or commits embezzlement
where they steal money illegally from a company maybe they try to
dot or commit extortion where they try to get money illegally from somebody you
try to extort money from that person maybe you try to fix the result of
something as we saw here with a match match fixing
maybe bribe or somebody commits bribery where you offer money to somebody for a
favor or to get them to do something for you you try to bribe them in politics
it's quite common that politicians receive money or a bribe in order to
pass a law or to change the zoning regulation so people can build houses
and things like that bribery blackmail is another problem as well where you
blackmail somebody you get information about somebody and you threaten to make
that information public unless they give you money you blackmail somebody graft
is another problem where politicians use their influence for illegal gain graft
very very common in some countries graft and the last one here is swindle where
you deceive somebody or you trick them into giving you their money you swindle
money okay swindle now these are some expressions related to fraud and
corruption the first one we can see here is cook the books you cook the books
similar to false accounting where you try to manipulate the records your
financial records in a company you cook the books you can try to buy somebody
off maybe you try to give money to somebody to influence the decision again
okay close to bribery okay you buy somebody
off for the influence or they do favors for you you can be a front for something
or something can be a front maybe there's some type of business that you
see but there's an illegal activity behind it so there's like a front
you can siphon off you can siphon money off this is where again if you use the
money from a company illegally you can siphon the money off for personal
expenses personal gain to siphon off you can grease somebody's Parliament where
you give them money in exchange for something again bribery you grease
somebody's palm it's another way of saying bribery and you can pay money
under the table you can pay money in be illegally under the table you pay money
under the table you give money under the table so it's not open it's not
transparent so the tax man or the tax inspector doesn't doesn't know about it
because you're paying money under the table for something so all of these
words are related to fraud and corruption now thank you very much for
watching the lesson if you have any questions or comments please leave them
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lesson have a good day bye