it occurs to me that perhaps another useful message in addition to "turning yourself in is on expectation positive" would be "your fraud is in fact unusual in your social reference class." If I imagine the sort of fraudster who's a "normal person" "who made a bad mistake", this person probably doesn't think of themselves AS a fraudster. They presumably rationalize their behavior with "I made a mistake but I'm fixing it" and, crucially, "everybody does this (or something like it)". The latter leg of the rationalization seems like another productive point to attack—always supposing, of course, that the attack is true.
This is very funny and I hope helpful to someone
it occurs to me that perhaps another useful message in addition to "turning yourself in is on expectation positive" would be "your fraud is in fact unusual in your social reference class." If I imagine the sort of fraudster who's a "normal person" "who made a bad mistake", this person probably doesn't think of themselves AS a fraudster. They presumably rationalize their behavior with "I made a mistake but I'm fixing it" and, crucially, "everybody does this (or something like it)". The latter leg of the rationalization seems like another productive point to attack—always supposing, of course, that the attack is true.
Re: footnote 1. Do you think your blog has a higher-than-average proportion of fraudsters reading it?