Deception as a method of committing a criminal offense in the history of the criminal legislation of Ukraine

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of deception as a method of committing a criminal offense in domestic criminal legislation.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the use of deception as a method of committing a crime (criminal offense) in the monuments of criminal law, its place in the constructions of legislative provisions, and its impact on criminal liability.

The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time, a study was conducted of the criminal-legal significance of deception as a method of committing a criminal offense in acts of criminal legislation that operated in Ukraine.

It has been established that, in domestic monuments of criminal legislation, deception was used as: a) a sign of the main components of a criminal offense; b) a qualifying feature of the components of criminal offenses; c) a circumstance affecting the imposition of punishment. It has been found that deception as a method of committing a criminal offense could affect the determination of not only the measure of punishment, but also its type. It has been studied that the normative definition of fraud is found only in one act of criminal legislation – the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR of 1922.

It was found that in the first monuments of criminal leegislation, deception was of a casuistic nature. The deceiving method in them usually followed from the content of the disposition. In the course of the development of the provisions of criminal law, deception as a method of committing a criminal offense acquired a wider scope. In later monuments of criminal legislation, there is a refusal to construct formulations of criminal offenses that provide for casuistic manifestations of deception, giving preference, instead, to direct indications of "deception".