According to Piquero and Clipper (2014) in their book ‘White Collar Crimes’, w hite-collars criminals are people who commit any crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, stealing office equipment and or professional people who commit crimes while at their work station or place of business. On the other hand Sutherland and Geis (2012 refer to white-collar criminals as individuals who get financial motivation to commit crimes in a way that is non-violent at their workstations or business locations. Similarly according to Shover et al., (2013) white-collar criminals are people like managers and executives who commit financial fraud. White-collar crimes were first defined by a sociologist named Edwin Sutherland in 1993 and he defined it as the type of crime that is committed by a person of high respectability while performing his occupational duties. The FBI has however formulated a narrow approach when defining white-collar crimes in that they define them as unlawful happenings or acts that are associated with concealment, contrary acts of trust, or procedures or actions which do not necessarily have violence or physical force.. This approach is not well-taken in the US because the definition does not say anything about the status of the offenders which may sometimes make policy evaluation challenging. In the United States the extent of damage cost is estimated to be between $300 and $660 billion annually though the true extent of the damage is quite difficult to quantify.
All the above sources similarly agree that white-collar crimes include copyright infringement, fraud, ponzi schemes, embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, insider trading, cyber-crimes among others and that these types of crimes are usually investigated by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), The FBI, and the securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). JW Coleman wrote in his Macmillan journal titled ‘The criminal elite: Understanding white-collar crime’ that white-collar criminals face time in prison and heavy fines if by any case they are found guilty and convicted of these crimes. More so institutions like banks that commit such crimes on an institution-wide level risk being charged with financial damages from the Federal government as seen from an article titled ‘ Collaring the crime, not the criminal: Reconsidering the concept of white-collar crime. ’ written by ( Shapiro 2010) .
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White-collar crimes can also occur in corporate when a large-scale fraud is committed through an entire institution. For example Bank of America was found guilty in 2004 for selling billions in Mortgage-backed securities which were tied to its properties with values which were highly inflated. Due to theses financial misdeeds the Bank Crashed in 2008 and it was passed to pay billions of dollars in damages and to admit and apologize for its wrong doings.
From Shapiro (2010), white-collar crimes are defined according to different things and these things are the factors that will determine whether a crime can be categorized as white-collar or not. These are determined by the type of offense that has been committed which may include economic crime, property crime or other acts which are at corporate-levels like those that will violate the environment, health, or law. Other scholars ( Van and Cullen, 2016) while writing The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime, suggested that at times a crime is only purported to have happened because of the identity of the person who has been found guilty for example huge amounts of money laundering can only be possible if the senior officers employed in the bank participate in the crime. They go ahead to say that white-collar crimes can also be measured by the type of person that the offender is for example it could be a person of high socioeconomic status, high social class, academic qualification of the offender or any person in a position of trust or the authorities could look at the motivation behind the crime for example greed or revenge. In this case the offense is described by the conduct of the person and not by referencing the person’s character and therefore the only way that this crime becomes different from others is through the characteristics of the backgrounds of the people committing it. More often than not white-collar offenders are characterized by privileged lives and coming from classes of inequality. Benson and Gottschalk (2015) state that white-collar crimes are categorized in to two: occupational crime-where offenders are driven by personal interests and are therefore likely to alter records which allow them to overcharge clients or people who cheat clients to obtain financial favors or gains and organizational or namely corporate crimes whereby company executives may opt to commit criminal acts so as to promote their companies and in the process, end up overcharging their clients or engaging in false advertising.
It is however very hard to prosecute white-collar crimes simply because most people who perpetrate them use very high-tech methods to conceal their crimes. Also, they do this through a series of transactions that may sometimes end up in a dead end. However, companies may have snitches or tell-ins or sometimes the company may refer to them as moles who may leak the company’s fishy activities including corruption, bribery, laundering or other forms of white-collar crimes as written by Haines (2016
Haines goes ahead to say that all forms of white-collar crimes are punishable by law, and different states have made their sentences for these crimes which they deem fit. In the US punishment for white-collar crimes depends with the magnitude of the crimes and it ranges from community service, probation, fines, restitution, and disgorgement to even imprisonment for many numbers of years. In Utah, for example, the state devised ways to protect its citizens from malicious frauds who were committing white-collar crimes by establishing the nation’s very first online registry for white-collar criminals. The state ensured that people who had been convicted of these crimes had their photos posted online in the registry. This was enacted in 2016. These individuals were rated according to the magnitude of their crimes and in addition these fellows were also convicted to court terms. The state opted for this method because Ponzi schemes were targeted on religious communities that were largely based on the Salt Lake City of Utah ( Pavlo, 2014).
All states in the world have come up with their own different strategies of dealing with white-collar criminals and the punishments accorded are always far from light. White-collars offenders may stand a chance to defend themselves but they need hardcore facts to unchain themselves from these allegations because the investigations are normally conducted by high government authorities which hardly miss any detail.
Many scholarly sites and articles differ very little when describing this vice and more often than not they agree on many factors that constitute to what is termed as white-collar crimes.
References
Benson, M. L., & Gottschalk, P. (2015). Public service motivation theory: differences between white-collar criminals in the public and private sectors. Journal of International Doctoral Research (JIDR) Volume 4, Number 1, December 2015 , 56.
Haines, F. (2016). Taming Business? Understanding Effectiveness in the Control of Corporate and White-collar Crime. In What is to Be Done About Crime and Punishment? (pp. 223-250). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Piquero, N. L., & Clipper, S. (2014). White Collar Crime (pp. 5531-5538). Springer New York.
Shapiro, S. P. (2010). Collaring the crime, not the criminal: Reconsidering the concept of white-collar crime. American sociological review , 346-365.
Shover, N., Hochstetler, A., & Alalehto, T. (2013). Choosing white-collar crime. The oxford handbook of criminological theory .
Sutherland, E. H., & Geis, G. (2012). White collar crime (p. 9). New York: Dryden Press.
Van Slyke, S., & Cullen, F. T. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime . Oxford University Press.
