Contrary to the popular belief, White Collar criminals are thieves and the methods used to conceal their offences are both artful and ingenious. Concealment of the crime is always an objective of the offender, and it becomes an element of the crime itself. Because it is a form of deceit which is skilfully disguised, the investigation itself is often long and laborious as far as proving criminal intent is concerned. The offence itself may be disguised in a confusing array of legitimate transactions and unnoticeable skims from company budgets that could very easily go undetected unless audited or viewed along with all previous transactions. It is only when someone who understands the business as well as the suspected criminal, that the crime itself can be fully understood and solved. From the standpoint of the criminal, the ideal white-collar crime is one that will never be recognized or detected as a criminal act.
We are all victims of white-collar crime. Individuals are victimized regularly as a result of a huge number of consumer frauds, ranging from being cheated on weights and measures at a local supermarket to price-fixing violations that raise the cost of goods, and services in every area of the community. Fraud takes shape in many forms, designed to convince individuals to invest their money. Victims involved in these scams are assured they will receive substantial profits, increased security, and huge tax savings. Often, this type of fraud results in victims losing their life savings, leaving them financially and emotionally devastated. The victim of an assault will recover, however, the impact of a fraud can last a lifetime. This is especially true when the elderly are victimized, as they have little or no hope of re-establishing themselves in financial terms. The elderly have been a particularly vulnerable group to white-collar crimes because of their trusting nature. Such things as food poisoning have been issues, where seriously out of date food is sold and the sale of low quality goods and in some cases extremely dangerous home appliances. Pension fraud is the other category of this crime, businessmen may approach older couples with talk of great investment opportunities, which would double their money, only to pocket the money and vanish.
Victimisation can also be gendered as suggested in (Croall, 2001), for example: Women are constantly looking to improve the way they look, it is because of this that fraudsters take advantage of women’s weakness. Some women were sold items like contraceptive pills, beauty applications and make-up, other things like perfumes which are easily faked and sold by the ton to unsuspecting buyers, dietary supplements is another item with a high health risk. In some cases women died, some were rendered infertile others suffered long term health effects. White-collar criminals also victimize businesses. They are victims of insider embezzlement, an offence of the highest level in business related crimes, where employees could eventually bring destruction to the organization. There have been many documentations of this specific form of embezzlement by high status employees, such as the Enron scandal. Enron lost hundreds of millions of dollars gained by top Enron Corp. officials who mysteriously sold a large amount of company shares before the company collapsed. The government is also a victim of white-collar crime through tax frauds and the wrongful exploitation of governmental programs. Big corporations are cheating the government in the collection of taxes, which limits services and places additional burdens on the taxpaying public.
Most white-collar offenders are normal people. They see their actions as normal business practice. They know they are violating the law, but they believe in doing whatever is necessary, to stay in business, be successful, and stay competitive. They are not concerned with the cost to the general population. Crimes of this nature are very often completely invisible to anybody, the reason for this is that the people involved are usually the ones occupying the big chairs in the company, also most of the schemes involved with making money for these men are legitimate. Often the people involved will be legitimately present at the scene so that no concerns arise. Because this type of operation is run by the top dogs there can be a network of people working together to make sure nothing goes wrong, employers will find people most suited for the job, this usually includes people with lots of expertise in their area of work, because of this, convicting the people involved becomes much harder. The organisational nature of the crimes means that the ones suspected will usually entail anyone with the companies responsibility entrusted to them, this of course could be a very large amount of people depending on the size of the company. Victimisation is hard to detect with most cases because there is very rarely a direct or intentional victim to these crimes.
I have talked about the varying forms of white-collar crimes in this essay, the individuals that are benefiting and being victimised from these types of crime, I have also outlined the dangers involved with these highly illegal crimes. But do white collar crimes hurt anybody? There is generally a mixture of feelings on the effect that white-collar crimes have on people, depending on what situation the crime is under will have varying effects on people. Some have a devastating effects on business,’ some can ruin the lives of ordinary people, some don’t have much of an effect on anybody. For example most people think fraud is a victimless crime, but you are the victim. As a result of insurance fraud in the USA, Americans pay an extra one thousand thirty dollars per year in insurance premiums. For this reason, seventy eight percent of Americans are becoming concerned about the effects of insurance fraud on auto insurance.(Champion, 2004)
On the other hand monster businesses with very deep pockets suffer minor losses from time to time, whether to do with lawful or unlawful activities, yet they are able to completely make a recovery without any personal injury towards the company. In this sense white collar crime is victimless, whether it is moral is another question.
The overall cost of most corporate and white collar crimes are very high usually, this mean business’ will make an attempt to hold them selves together and find a way of making back any money lost. There are various ways companies tackle this, some raise prices on their retail goods or they might apply budget cuts and possibly wage cuts. These factors along with many others is what is eroding the publics confidence In big companies. People entrust themselves to one company which they are loyal to but situations like these can devastate the company’s image and once this happens it takes a long time to build up the trust and confidence of clientele. It is hard to look at news and not feel angry when you hear of a top official in a company who has been embezzling money for years then gets away with it. It makes everyday normal people think they can get away with it, only when society comes together to try and make a difference and put a stop to it will there be a change.
Bibliography:
Beguai, A 1978, White Collar Crime: a 20th century crisis, Lexington Books, USA
Croall, H 2001, Understanding white collar crime, Philadelphia PA, USA
Levi, M 2001, Victims of white collar crime: the social and media construction of business fraud, Oxford, UK
Slapper, G & Tombs, S 1999, Corporate Crime, Longman, UK
Stephen, R 2004, Profit without honour ; white collar crime and the looting of America, Pearson Education, USA
Geis, G & Meier, R 1977, White-Collar crime: offences in business, politics and the professions, New York Free Press, USA
Champion, M 2004, How Does Insurance Fraud Hurt South Carolina Citizens?, viewed 7 March 2004,
