On average, people are more likely to defraud others when not working within a large organized business.
Mixed Partly true and partly false in roughly equal measure.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
Judged as of 2019-07-18 against empirical research on fraud rates. True: research consistently shows that fraud against counterparties or customers is more common, on average and per transaction or per person, among individuals or small or informal operations than among people working within large organized businesses. Mostly true: the evidence leans this way but is limited or covers only some types of fraud. Mixed: the evidence is conflicting or varies by type of fraud with no clear average. Mostly false: there is no research supporting the claim as a general finding (it is unproven), or the claim generalizes from a narrow finding. False: the evidence shows that people within large businesses commit fraud at equal or higher average rates.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 HOW PERVASIVE IS CORPORATE FRAUD? Alexander Dyck, Adair Morse, Luigi Zingales (University of Toronto, UC Berkeley/NBER, University of Chicago/NBER/CEPR) · February 2021
“Thus, the lower detection likelihood reflects a real difference between large and small companies: more fraud go undetected in small companies.”
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E2 Big name corporations more likely to commit fraud Washington State University News · 2 February 2021
“The researchers found that companies with Fortune 500 status were represented nearly four times as often among the firms that had committed fraud than in the nonfraudulent control group.”
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E3 Organisational scale and fraud volatility: An exploratory agent-based simulation of occupational fraud dynamics PubMed Central (NCBI) · 17 July 2026
“Existing evidence is inconsistent. Surveys conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and the UK Home Office [4,10] do not consistently show higher fraud rates in larger organisations once exposure is taken into account.”
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E4 Organisational scale and fraud volatility: An exploratory agent-based simulation of occupational fraud dynamics PubMed Central (NCBI) · 17 July 2026
“This study is an exploratory, conceptual agent-based simulation not empirically calibrated to real-world data.”
Reasoning
On the evidence given, the research conflicts and shows no clear average, so the claim is rated mixed.
Cite this claim
Tyler Cowen, “On average, people are more likely to defraud others when not working within a large organized business.” (said 18 July 2019). Verdict: mixed. Reliability API, claim c_47c5066fd55b, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_47c5066fd55b
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.