Religious fraud

Religious fraud is a term used for civil or criminal fraud carried out in the name of a religion or within a religion, e.g. false claims to being kosher or tax fraud.
A specific form of religious fraud is pious fraud (Latin: "pia fraus"), whereby one employs lies and/or deception in order to convince others of the truth of one's own religion or specific religious claims. Sometimes these involve 'white lies': the perpetrator may think it more important to make others accept a certain belief than that the method is truthful; this end justifies the means of a lie. A well-known example is the Shroud of Turin, a late Medieval fabrication that supposedly was the clothing in which Jesus would have been buried in the 1st century.