Year 12 work experience

I live in southeast London and I want to be a private investigator or fraud examiner. Does anyone know where I’ll be able to find work experience for that

The police do work experience. You could give that a go

In my opinion, fraud examination is a big area on its own and there are different routes to be a fraud examiner, depending on which area interests you the most and you want to specialize. Fraud examiners can specialize in anti-fraud fields like financial auditing, loss prevention at retail, internal audit, law enforcement, anti money-laundering, banking compliance, etc.

Police work is definitely a good start as it will introduce you to the investigation and evidence documentation process (like eDiscovery and chain of custody).

To give you a better idea of what fraud examination involves, you may want to specialise in these particular fields:
- Financial statement/ accounting fraud
- Financial Institution fraud (e.g., money transfer fraud, suspicious transaction report, payment fraud like credit card fraud)
- Loss prevention (e.g., asset misappropriation by workers in companies with many branches/ chain)
- Bribery and corruption (e.g., kickbacks)
- IT/ computer fraud (e.g., theft of data and intellectual property, identity theft, security, malware, hacking)
- Insurance fraud
- Health care fraud (underrated area, IMO. This cost taxpayer and the government a lot of money each year and it's a big issue in the US)
- Consumer fraud (e.g., commercial crime, elder fraud, ponzi/ pyramid scheme)
- Contract and procurement fraud (e.g., bid rigging in the construction sector, contract law, preventing unethical/ unfair procurement methods)

Thanks. Where do you get all this information from

I work in the compliance field and I passed the CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner) professional certification exam. I graduated from university in 2015/6 and I saw your post by chance. Meanwhile, getting the relevant fraud-related experience and internship would significantly benefit your future career and employability in the specialised field of fraud examination. However, don't worry about professional certifications yet since you are just in year 12, but I definitely recommend going to university and studying for a course that would subsequently help you develop your specialised interest in the field of fraud examination. For example, some of my friends studied accounting and finance at university before entering forensic accounting and financial statement fraud examination.