To his surprise, Paul Mason saw himself on the screen. Someone had videotaped him getting his morning coffee at Panera Bread and driving to the School of Business.

Maybe next time Mason will think twice before he turns his students into crooks, teaching them how to wash checks, steal credit card information, even swindle the elderly.

Callie Reber, a master’s student from McPherson, is in Mason’s “Fraud Examination and Forensic Accounting” class. Her group did a presentation on surveillance, and couldn’t think of a better target than Mason.

They always saw him with a Panera cup in the morning, and they asked an administrative assistant near his office what time he usually got in. She said 7 a.m., so by 6:30 they were waiting at Panera, 520 W. 23rd St.

“It made me think about how I follow the same routine every day,” Reber said. “He thought it was a good way to show a real-life example of a class concept.”

The class, ACCT 741, is a graduate level class designed for people who will work with auditing. For some like Reber, who will be doing auditing for a firm in Kansas City next year, that might be a career as an auditor for a big company. But fraud is becoming more commonplace. Mason said detecting fraud “is becoming part of the accountant’s toolkit.”

“It takes a thief to train a thief to catch a thief,” Mason said. “We teach them the things that crooks do.”

From Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 in 2010 — about nine months — there were 282 counts of counterfeiting or forgery in Lawrence, according to the Lawrence police website. There were 52 counts of false pretenses or swindling, 501 counts of credit card or ATM fraud, 33 counts of impersonation, and nine counts of embezzlement.

On campus last year, there was one reported forgery and no embezzlement — better than 2001, when there were nine counts of forgery and 11 of embezzlement. And there were six cases of fraud last year on campus.

Mason said forensic accounting is one of the hottest jobs in accounting. But while it’s a problem everywhere, even rearing its head here on campus, Kansas City “is not a hotbed” for the job, with many big companies basing their fraud detection in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York City.

The class trained students broadly. It started with an overview of fraud, talking about why people steal and the art of deception. From there, it moved on to specific methods of fraud. Finally, the class broke into groups, each of which mastered a method of fraud.

The groups are giving presentations this week about the type of fraud they researched, on varying topics: surveillance, fraud gadgets, identity theft, mortgage fraud and even check washing.

“These criminals, they spend all day perfecting these techniques,” Mason said. “We arm our students with the ability to identify them.”

Katie Cox, a master’s student from St. Louis who plans to work as an audit associate for a public accounting firm, is in the class too. Her group did its presentation on health care fraud.

“I keep feeling like my grandma needs to take this class,” she said.

Her group researched ways of swindling the elderly, such as through Medicare or by providing services that people don’t need.

“It’s made me a little less naive,” Cox said. “I had several ‘aha’ moments.”

In addition to preparing students to spot signs of fraud, Mason set up the presentations in an executive format to give students practice at presenting their research professionally. He encouraged students to connect to their audience.

So Cox and her group decided to start their presentation with a classic scene from “Happy Gilmore,” where an old woman complains of pain before Ben Stiller’s character responds that her back will hurt too because she “just pulled landscaping duty.”

There isn’t any doubt that the class was interesting for its students and taught them different methods of fraud. But the question remains whether it was more interesting or terrifying.

“It was the one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever had,” Cox said.

But now Mason will have to keep checking his rearview mirror for students with videocameras. And Reber, whose group did the spying, said the class made her more suspicious, too.

“I asked for a shredder from my parents for Christmas,” Reber said.

— Edited by Clark Goble