case study for white collar crime

10 White Collar Crime Cases That Made Headlines

Since the collapse of Enron a decade ago due to shoddy and deceptive accounting practices, America has become more aware of the seriousness of white collar crimes. The work of a small handful of people can result in the demise of a multi-billion dollar company, the complete loss of value of its stock, and most problematically, the loss of numerous jobs ranging from the innocent higher-ups to the hardworking office managers. The next time you hear about someone receiving a 12-year sentence because of a marijuana offense, remember the real harm done in these cases of corporate corruption.

1. Enron collapse

With revenues exceeding $100 billion and the distinction of being named by Fortune as “America’s Most Innovative Company,” Enron was a seemingly indestructible energy giant during the beginning of the 2000s. However, even during its rise in the ’90s, rumors swirled that it was involved in illegal accounting procedures with its accounting firm Arthur Anderson, then one of the “Big Five” accounting firms. Jeffrey Skilling, who served as president COO and CEO, along with a staff he assembled, hid billions of dollars of debt through poor financial reporting, accounting loopholes and the use of special purpose entities. Andrew Fastow, COO, deceived the board of directors about the company’s accounting practices and convinced Arthur Anderson to go along for the ride. After stocks plummeted, the SEC conducted an investigation that ultimately resulted in the 24-year, 4-month prison sentence of Skilling and six-year sentence of Fastow. Founder Kenneth Lay died of a heart attack before he was sentenced.

2. Worldcom accounting scandal

Enron’s impressive collapse was followed by the implosion of Worldcom, which was the doing of CEO Bernard Ebbers. His plan to compensate for the downturn of the telecommunications industry in 2000 and Worldcom’s declining stock included the use of fraudulent accounting methods in order to deceive investors into thinking the company was in good health. The underreporting of line costs and inflation of revenues accumulated $3.8 billion in fraud and ended with the company’s bankruptcy, then the largest in U.S. history. Ebbers, who resigned from Worldcom in April 2002, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and securities fraud and filing false statements with securities regulators.

3. Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme

The word “Ponzi” was introduced into America’s lexicon in late 2008 when Madoff was arrested and charged with securities fraud. The former lifeguard, sprinkler installer and chairman of NASDAQ managed to build a multi-billion dollar investment firm with false trading reports and without assistance from the major derivatives firms, each of which refused to trade with him. Although he had been suspected of being a sham a decade before, it wasn’t until 2008 that he was arrested after his misdeeds were reported by one of his sons. In 2009, he pled guilty to 11 federal crimes including securities fraud, money laundering, and theft from an employee benefit plan. The penalty: 150 years in prison and $170 billion in restitution — investors lost billions of dollars due to the scandal, and three people involved with the business, including Bernie’s son Mark, committed suicide.

4. InStock trading scandal

Another chapter in the white collar crime saga of the early 2000s, the InStock trading scandal made headlines because of the involvement of Martha Stewart, who sold about $230,000 of the company’s stock a day before an experimental cancer drug failed to gain FDA approval. Memorably, she was found guilty of obstruction of justice, conspiracy and lying about a stock sale, and served five months in prison. Founder Samuel Waskal, who advised friends and family to sell stock and attempted to sell his own stock prior to the announcement, pled guilty to charges of bank fraud, securities fraud, obstruction of justice and perjury. He was sentenced to a seven-year, three-month prison sentence in 2009, but was released in 2009.

5. Adelphia collapse

At the time of its bankruptcy in 2002, Adelphia was the fifth-largest cable provider in the U.S., and in 2003, it generated more than $3.6 billion in revenue — that’s just $1.3 billion more than the off-balance-sheet debt accumulated by the company, which led to its demise. John Rigas, the founder, and Timothy Rigas, his son who ran the company, are currently serving 15-and 20-year prison sentences respectively for embezzling the money from corporate investors and using corporate funds as their own. Adelphia’s run of more than 50 years officially ended in 2006 when the remainder of its revenue-generating assets were purchased by Comcast and Time Warner.

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6. tyco accounting scandal.

A year after he was named one of the top 25 corporate managers of 2001 by Business Week , it was uncovered that Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, along with former CFO Mark Swartz, stole more than $150 million from the company, including $2 million that was used for a birthday party for Kozlowski’s wife that was thrown in Sardinia. The thieving men were spared after their first trial was declared a mistrial because a juror said she received a letter urging her to side with the prosecution. The second trial ended with the convictions of Kozlowski and Swartz as both were sentenced to no less than eight years and four months in prison.

7. HealthSouth accounting scandal

One of the largest comprehensive rehabilitative services companies in the country, HealthSouth had been suspected of unethical financial practices since its emergence in the late ’80s. Under the leadership of Richard Scrushy, it was discovered that it falsified at least $2.7 billion worth of profits between 1996 and 2002 and later agreed to pay $325 million for allegedly defrauding Medicare and other federal healthcare programs, according to the Department of Justice. Scrushy was acquitted of charged related to the matter, but later sentenced to a six-year, 10-month prison sentence for bribery in mail fraud in an unrelated case.

8. Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal

In an unmistakably Washington saga deserving of its own movie, Abramoff’s cluster of scandals had far-reaching consequences implicating politicians and even the mob. In 2006, he pled guilty to fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion for his efforts to cheat Indian casino gambling interests out of roughly $85 million in fees. A couple of months later, he was sentenced to 70 months in prison for using a fake wire transfer in order to qualify for a $60 million loan in the purchase of SunCruz Casinos, a deal which resulted in the murder of former owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis. Most notably, then-Republican Ohio Representative Bob Ney was sentenced to a prison term for accepting bribes from Abramoff, helping the Democrats in their effort to gain a majority in Congress during the 2006 midterm elections.

9. Countrywide political loan scandal (and contribution to the subprime mortgage crisis)

Politicians and big businesses need each other. And while their relationships are often too cozy, as evidenced by the Countrywide political loan scandal of 2008 and 2009, as long as campaigns are privately financed and businesses have stake in the political game, those uncomfortable relationships will continue to exist. Former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo can attest to the discomfort, as his Friends of Angelo program, which provided politicians mortgage financing at noncompetitive rates, helped tarnish his already floundering reputation. He resigned on July 1, 2008 and a later reached settlement with the SEC in which he agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines because he misled shareholders regarding the internal dealings of the company.

10. Marcus Schrenker fraud and attempted fake death

Although he didn’t wield the same kind of power as guys such as Lay, Ebbers or Kozlowski, Schrenker, who owned three financial companies, accumulated a bounty of wealth as an investment advisor responsible for multi-million dollar pension funds. But it all disappeared in an instant. His failure to inform seven investors of high fees for switching annuities, and the resulting loss of $250,000, brought forth a complaint from The Indiana Department of Insurance in 2008 that intensified suspicion of his unethical practices. Ultimately, the expiration of his Indiana state financial adviser’s license prompted an investigation. In 2009, instead of facing the consequences of his action, Schrenker attempted to fake his death by faking a plane crash, parachuting out before the damage was done. He was eventually captured and sentences to four years in prison for the fiasco. He still faces charges of securities fraud.

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• Justice Is Served: 5 Famous…

Justice Is Served: 5 Famous White Collar Crime Cases

Some of the most complex and high-profile types of criminal investigations are those involving white collar crime cases. Though the term can refer to crimes ranging from securities fraud to embezzlement to money laundering, “white collar crime” generally refers to a nonviolent crime committed for financial gain , according to Investopedia. These crimes are usually investigated by federal agencies like the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission along with state-level agencies.

In fact, Utah established America’s first online registry for white collar criminals in 2016, Investopedia says. Those convicted of white collar crimes face prison sentences along with the potential of paying millions of dollars in financial damages and fines.

Because those involved in white collar crime are usually high-ranking business professionals and executives, serious cases usually make headlines nationwide and even globally. The following are some of the most famous (or infamous) companies and individuals involved in white collar crime cases. These examples show that, while such crimes involve large amounts of money and extensive concealment, trained law enforcement professionals are able to investigate and prosecute white collar crimes successfully.

In this famous white collar crime case, a company that was once successful resorted to schemes to hide losses and fabricate profits. Though Enron shares were worth $90.75 at its peak , they fell to just $0.67 after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002. Some of the criminal practices involved in the Enron case included using off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles (SPVs) in order to hide mounting debt and “toxic assets” from both investors and creditors. Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Andrew Fastow was held largely responsible for orchestrating these false business tactics.

As one of the “ biggest accounting scandals in U.S. history ,” according to CBS News, the WorldCom investigation began when internal audits found “improper accounting of more than $3.8 billion in expenses over five quarters.” These accounting irregularities did not conform to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and resulted in the resignation of senior vice president and controller David Myers, as well as layoffs for more than 17,000 WorldCom employees.

HealthSouth

In 2004, auditors discovered “ hundreds of millions of dollars in previously unreported accounting fraud at HealthSouth ,” according to The New York Times . The chain of hospitals and clinics was found to have “$2.5 billion in fraudulent accounting entries from 1996 to 2002, $500 million in incorrect accounting äó_ and other items involved in acquisitions from 1994 to 1999, and $800 million to $1.6 billion in ‘aggressive accounting’ from 1992 to March 2003,” the same article reports. This brought the total range of fraudulent entries to a staggering $3.8 billion to $4.6 billion. Founder Richard M. Scrushy was indicted on 84 counts of fraud, and at least five former CFOs pleaded guilty to charges.

Bernard Madoff

Perhaps the most well-known white collar criminal is Bernard Madoff, who was convicted of fraud costing investors $65 billion in 2009. The wealth management portion of his business took money from investors to pay former investors, without ever actually investing funds. Madoff, the former chairman of Nasdaq and founder of a successful Wall Street firm, was sentenced to 150 years in prison for running “an elaborate Ponzi scheme , which promised large returns on investments,” Investopedia says.

Wells Fargo

One of the most recent instances of a white collar crime case involves Wells Fargo, a banking and financial services provider. In 2016, “federal regulators said Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts äóî without their customers knowing it äóî since 2011,” CNN Money says.

Opening some 1.5 million fraudulent deposit accounts and submitting 565,443 credit card applications allowed employees to hit unrealistic sales targets and receive bonuses. Customers were then wrongly charged fees for accounts they didn’t know existed. Wells Fargo must pay $185 million in fines and refund $5 million to affected customers. This is the largest penalty since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was founded in 2011.

Stopping White Collar Crime: Criminal Justice Education at King University

Fighting white collar crime requires law enforcement to look beyond traditional offenses and hold corrupt businesses and corporations accountable. Earning a criminal justice degree can help qualify you for careers that help keep communities safe and prevent crimes like those discussed here.

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From Enron To Madoff, Learn About The Most High-Profile White Collar Cases In US History

Learn more about some of the biggest white collar cases in the U.S., including the allegations against the so-called "Crypto King" Sam Bankman-Fried.

From Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, it seems like individuals accused of white-collar crimes are always in our social media and news feeds lately. The definition of white-collar crime includes crimes that are not violent, like some included in Oxygen 's new series " Blood & Money ," premiering March 11 at 9/8c — but they are not victimless, according to the FBI . White-collar crime can affect everyone, with examples ranging from health care fraud to corporate fraud to romance scams. Prosecutions of corporate and white-collar crimes hit an all-time low in 2022 — following a pattern of decline for more than a decade. Sixty-two percent of criminal referrals for white-collar offenses that federal prosecutors received were closed without any action last year. 

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These statistics are all according to the latest available case by case records from the U.S. Dept. of Justice as of Jan. 2023, compiled into a report by TRAC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center that’s part of the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

RELATED: How Cold Cases Get Solved: Experts On Thinking ‘Out Of The Box’ With New Techniques

Charges for white-collar criminal activity in 2022 were extraordinarily rare — just one percent.

During the fiscal year 2022, only 4,180 white-collar defendants were prosecuted. The number of prosecutions peaked in 2011, when prosecutions hit 10,162 — nearly two and a half times the current levels, according to the TRAC report. 

Here’s a look at the most high-profile white-collar cases in U.S. history, brought to life in documentaries, TV shows, books, podcasts and movies.

The collapse of Enron in Dec. 2001 is still considered by the FBI to be its most complex and biggest white-collar crime investigation in its history. 

The top executives at the Houston-based energy company cheated investors and filled their own pockets using complex accounting gimmicks like overvaluing assets to boost cash flow and earnings statements, according to the FBI. The idea was to deceive the public and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about the true performance of Enron’s businesses. Enron declared bankruptcy in Dec. 2001, causing investors to lose millions. 

In a five year-long investigation, FBI agents conducted more than 1,800 interviews and collected more than 3,000 boxes of evidence and more than four terabytes of digitized data. More than $164 million was seized—to date about $90 million has been forfeited to help compensate victims, according to the FBI. 

Twenty-two people were convicted for their actions related to the fraud, including Chief Executive Officers Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in May 2006 on charges including conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud and making false statements, according to the Department of Justice . 

“With their convictions, we’ve convicted nearly the entire senior executive management team at Enron,” said Michael Anderson, supervisory special agent of the FBI Houston Enron Task Force, in a video marking 10 years since the convictions. “I think we sent a strong message to business executives around the country that the FBI and Department of Justice will hold executives accountable for their actions, regardless of their position in a company or any political affiliations.”

Less than six weeks after his conviction, and before he could be sentenced, Lay died at the age of 64 at his vacation home in Aspen, Colorado in July 2006, after suffering from a heart attack, according to NPR . The government had been seeking more than $40 million in restitution from him, but he claimed during the trial he was broke. 

Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison, but in 2013, a federal judge reduced that sentence to 14 years, and he was released from federal custody in Feb. 2019, according to NBC News. Under the agreement, more than $40 million of Skilling’s fortune was distributed to victims of the scheme.

2 . Bernie Madoff

The mastermind behind the largest Ponzi scheme ever in the United States, Bernie Madoff ruined the financial fortunes of thousands of people. He was first charged with securities fraud in Dec. 2008, after he told his employees that his advisory business was a fraud, and “all just one big lie.” 

Madoff admitted that for years he’d been paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors — estimating the losses from this fraud were at least $50 billion, the SEC said.

The SEC made rule changes starting in 2009 to try and prevent this level of fraud from ever happening again. This included changes to how the agency carries out inspections of investment advisers and brokerage firms, as well as steps to provide better protection of customers’ assets against theft and abuse, Fortune reported. The agency also started a new electronic system for taking tips and complaints to better help detect fraud.

Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for his massive fraud scheme and ended up dying at the age of 82 at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C. in April 2021.

3 . "Crypto King" Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto exchange FTX, is expected to go on trial in October for an allegedly fraudulent scheme affecting thousands of victims. His case has drawn comparisons to the crimes of Bernie Madoff. He’s charged with two counts of wire fraud, and six counts of conspiracy-related charges, according to CNN .

He’s accused of “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history” for stealing billions of dollars in customer funds from FTX to cover losses at FTX’s sister hedge fund, Alameda Research, CNN reported. After FTX filed bankruptcy in November, Bankman-Fried said he didn’t commit fraud, and didn’t know customer funds were being used improperly. 

FTX’s new CEO, John Ray III, made his name overseeing the liquidation of Enron in the early 2000s. He said in a congressional hearing that customer funds deposited on the FTX site were commingled with funds at Alameda, which made a number of speculative, high-risk bets, according to CNN. 

Two senior executives, Gary Wang, the co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, Alameda’s CEO, pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges, according to CNN. As he awaits trial, Bankman-Fried is on house arrest at his parents California home, on a $250 million bond. He could face up to 115 years in prison if convicted on all charges.

4 . Jordan Belfort the "Wolf of Wall Street"

“Money is the oxygen of capitalism and I wanna breathe more than any man alive!” Jordan Belfort tweeted on Aug. 30, 2021.

It’s a mantra the man known as the “Wolf Of Wall Street” has keep for decades, as he is now a motivational speaker and author 24 years after he was convicted of money laundering and securities fraud in 1999. After prison, Belfort landed a book and film deal.

Leonardo DiCaprio played Belfort in the 2013 Martin Scorsese film “The Wolf Of Wall Street”—based on Belfort’s life as a wealthy stockbroker who was later accused of crime and corruption. Belfort even helped DiCaprio do research on how to play himself.

“I spent hundreds of hours with Leo doing everything you could imagine, from hanging out socially to showing him what it’s like to be on drugs,” Belfort told Vanity Fair . “I took him through the stages [of taking Quaaludes] and I was rolling on the floor in his house as he was filming me.”

The real-life Belfort used his stock firm Stratton Oakmont and deceptive tactics to inflate the prices of penny stocks before the company dumped their own shares and watched prices crash, according to Fox News . A judge ordered him to pay $110 million in restitution, in addition to prison time. 

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Just as in the movie, Belfort described his 22 months in a California prison as a “boys’ club,” according to Vanity Fair, calling his experience “completely mellow.”

“I played tennis three hours a day, and I’d write for maybe 12,” Belfort told Vanity Fair. 

In 2020, Belfort sued Red Granite Pictures, the production company behind “The Wolf Of Wall Street” for $300 million dollars — part of an episode of CNBC’s “ American Greed: Biggest Cons .” 

Belfort signed over the rights to his two autobiographies, “The Wolf Of Wall Street” and “Catching the Wolf Of Wall Street” to the company in 2011.

Belfort ultimately dropped his lawsuit against Red Granite and agreed to take his claims to arbitration, according to the Hollywood Reporter .

5 . Martha Stewart

The queen of recipes, gardening, home décor and crafts found herself behind bars in a prison jumpsuit after she was convicted of several felonies, including making false statements to investigators looking into the sale of a stock. 

Martha Stewart spent five months in 2004 at a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia. In June 2003, the SEC filed securities fraud charges against Stewart and her former stockbroker, Peter Bacanovic. The SEC alleged she committed illegal insider trading when she sold stock in a biopharmaceutical company, ImClone Systems, Inc., after getting an unlawful tip from Bacanovic. 

The SEC said In Dec. 2001, Bacanovic tipped off Stewart that his other company clients, ImClone CEO Samuel Waksal and his daughter, had placed orders to sell ImClone stock they had at Merrill Lynch. That client secretly knew the FDA was about to reject ImClone’s cancer treatment called “Erbitux” and send stock prices plunging. The information about Waksal’s effort to sell was confidential under Merrill Lynch policy. 

After getting the tip, the SEC alleged Stewart sold all 3,928 shares of her ImClone stock, and when the price of stock dropped, Stewart avoided losses of $45,673. The SEC also accused Stewart and Bacanovic of making up an alibi for Stewart’s trades and lying about what happened. 

Forbes magazine estimated Stewart was worth $1 billion in 2000, but Stewart’s company worth dropped more than 50 percent after the insider trading scandal broke, and Stewart’s personal losses totaled more than $325 million in company holdings, according to ABC .  

Since her time in prison, Stewart’s made a comeback—publishing more cookbooks and creating a cooking show with rapper Snoop Dogg. 

6 . Elizabeth Holmes

A little over a year ago, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty of fraud related to her startup business that promised to revolutionize blood testing and healthcare.

Holmes claimed Theranos created a new medical device that could replace phlebotomy and provide scores of blood screening results from samples as small as a blood droplet from a finger prick, according to Oxygen.com. The device, called the “Edison,” was pitched as an efficient and cheaper alternative to traditional blood-screening methods. 

But Holmes was convicted of duping investors and patients about the flawed testing. 

Theranos raised nearly a billion dollars from a long list of high-profile investors, including billionaires such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch and software magnate Larry Ellison, according to Oxygen.com.

During the trial, prosecutors alleged Theranos’ blood-testing technology kept producing misleading results that led the company to secretly rely on conventional blood testing. Evidence presented at the trial also showed Holmes lied about purported deals that Theranos had reached with big drug companies such as Pfizer and the U.S. military, according to Oxygen.com .

In November, Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, and she’s scheduled to report to prison on April 27, according to Oxygen.com . She was given six months before the sentence began after it was revealed that she had gotten pregnant with her second child between her conviction and sentencing date.

7 . McDonald's Monopoly Scandal

McDonald’s Monopoly game seems innocent enough to play as you down your Big Mac and McFlurry. But an ex-cop managed to not just cheat at the board game, but also rig the real-life game and steal $24 million. How did he pull it off?

Jerome Jacobson worked in security for Simon Marketing, which in the 90s, made the game pieces for McDonald’s Monopoly, as well as the McDonalds game Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, according to CNBC . The idea was for customers to win up to a million bucks in prizes by buying fries, burgers, nuggets and drinks from McDonalds. Jacobson’s job was to guard those pieces. But he figured out a way to rig it so the winning pieces ended up with people he knew—who would then share their money and prizes with him. 

Jacobson and seven others were arrested by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice in August 2001 in what was called Operation “Final Answer.”

Jacobson’s job was to carry the pieces in a case shut with a tamper-proof seal—taking them to packaging centers around the county where he would apply them to things like French fry cartons that were randomly selected in a drawing. An independent auditor followed him to make sure the pieces were secure in the tamper proof case. 

So how did he rig the game pieces while he was being watched?

A foreign supplier mistakenly sent a package of tamper-proof seals to Jacobson directly, instead of Simon Marketing, according to CNBC. It gave Jacobson a way of opening and re-sealing the packages of winning pieces. He snuck off to the men’s bathroom in airports on his way to McDonald’s packaging centers—where the female auditor couldn’t follow him—and made the switches before re-sealing the supply.

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Jaconbson then used friends and family to recruit people who would pay tens of thousands of dollars upfront to Jacobson to secure winning game pieces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, all the way up to the $1 million grand prize, CNBC reported.

Despite his attempts to hide his fraud, federal authorities caught on when they got an anonymous tip and realized the many McDonald’s winners clustered in Georgia and Florida. 

When McDonald’s launched the game in 2001, the FBI was ready with wiretaps on recent suspicious winners as well as on Jacobson, who was a natural suspect as the head of security living near one of the clusters of winners.

Jacobson was sentenced to 37 months in prison , according to Oxygen.com reporting, and ordered to repay $12.5 million.

Others convicted in the scheme are also still paying back restitution, including ex-con and drug dealer Andrew Glomb , according to Oxygen.com . 

For more true-crime content, tune in to Oxygen 's new series "Blood & Money," premiering March 11 at 9/8c .

Blood & Money

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What I’ve Learned About White-Collar Crime

• Mary Jo White

A former top prosecutor shares her insights on what motivates perpetrators, how to prevent illicit conduct, and what corporate compliance efforts get wrong.

When I began practicing law, in the 1970s, white-collar crime didn’t get much attention outside my old office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors cared much more about homicides, drug kingpins, and the mob. Financial crimes weren’t considered very serious or interesting by most prosecutors. That’s changed for a variety of reasons.

• MW Mary Jo White , currently the senior chair of the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, is the former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

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Trusted White-Collar Offenders

Global Cases Studies of Crime Convenience

• © 2021
• Petter Gottschalk 0

Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway

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• Examines power, authority and white-collar crime across global case studies
• Accessibly written and engaging
• Examines women and white-collar crime

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Convenience Theory on Crime in the Corporate Sector

Breaking Out of the Cocoon: Whistleblowing Opportunities Under Conditions of Normalized Wrongdoing

Power, Crime and Deadly Deception

• corporate crime
• criminal behavior
• crime theory
• business crime
• crime prevention
• women and white-collar crime
• business ethics
• crime and power
• organizational behavior
• corporate fraud

Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

Petter Gottschalk

Theoretical Perspectives

Theory of crime convenience, potential offenders v. non-offenders, white-collar crime seriousness, case studies, chair of the board, chief executive officer, trusted female offenders, convenience dynamics, gender fraction stage model, crime convenience evolution, forecasting crime occurrence, white-collar community, back matter, authors and affiliations, about the author.

Petter Gottschalk is Professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School, Norway. Dr Gottschalk has published extensively on knowledge management, white-collar crime, fraud investigations, and convenience theory. Before joining academia, he held executive positions in business enterprises.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Trusted White-Collar Offenders

Book Subtitle : Global Cases Studies of Crime Convenience

Authors : Petter Gottschalk

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73862-4

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology , Law and Criminology (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-73861-7 Published: 25 April 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-73864-8 Published: 26 April 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-73862-4 Published: 24 April 2021

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIII, 355

Number of Illustrations : 37 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour

Topics : White Collar Crime , Crime Control and Security , Criminological Theory , Criminal Behavior , Business Ethics , Management Education

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What’s up With White Collar Crime?

We started reading Jennifer Taub’s book on white collar crime– Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime– on the December 2020 day that President Trump announced pardons for Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Charles Kushner and 26 other mostly white collar criminals. Coincidentally, Taub begins her book noting that:

Just after Valentine’s Day in 2020, President Donald Trump granted clemency to a slew of affluent felons. Their offenses? Bribery, investment fraud, tax evasion, Medicare fraud, public corruption, computer hacking, an extortion cover-up, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the federal government, obstruction of justice, mail fraud, wire fraud. No white collar criminal left behind.

Taub’s book notes that white collar crimes cost victims an estimated $300 billion to $800 billion per year, a huge multiple of the costs of street-level property crimes (around $16 billion annually). It also notes a nearly unlimited number of situations where blue collar criminals had the book thrown at them while often white collar criminals whose crimes were staggeringly larger were gifted very light treatment by the criminal justice system. Taub wonders why there are minimum sentences for many of the sorts of federal offenses that blue collar criminals commit, but not for those commonly committed by white collar criminals. To her credit, she points out how the two-tiered system of justice we have contributes mightily to the overall level of inequality in our society.

Taub has harsh words for President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, who acted as though criminal charges were not a realistic option for the hundreds if not thousands (or tens of thousands) of individuals in the real estate and financial industries who caused the Sub-Prime Mortgage Meltdown of 2007-2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. (One minor figure was nailed.) She is even less kind to the Trump Administration which by legal changes, prosecutorial decisions, Presidential pardons, and other actions made America a much safer world in which to be a fraudster, embezzler, and tax cheat.

Our interest, as always, regards whether behavioral ethics concepts can help explain why people commit white collar crime and how our society reacts to it. It seems to us that behavioral ethics can offer at least a few insights.

Why do people commit white collar crimes? Part of the reason is, of course, the self-serving bias . There’s just so much money to gain and so little risk of loss. Astonishingly, those whose income is in the top 1% are no more likely to be audited by the IRS than their fellow citizens who make less than $20,000 a year. More than $800 billion a year is slipping away from the federal government’s coffers due to tax fraud that is seldom punished. Even people who think of themselves as good folks are more likely to cheat when they know that they are not being watched in any meaningful way.

There are also huge riches to be gained through insider trading, securities fraud and manipulation, and all manner of financial skulduggery. There is certainly some self-selection going on here. Some people choose a finance profession because their relaxed moral attitude matches nicely with the opportunities the finance field presents. Others are just greedy. But we suspect that a substantial number are simply smart, driven people who think of themselves as winners and find themselves in a contest where winners are determined by dollar signs and too few people find it disqualifying that you might have cheated to end up with that huge mansion, the vacation home on Maui, and the Ferrari. Many studies indicate that when money is a constant consideration in our lives, moral factors tend to fade away. That ethical fading can cause even relatively well-intentioned people to make poor moral choices.

Taub herself cites what we call the conformity bias . She quotes the father of the concept of white collar crime, Professor Edwin Sutherland:

The hypothesis he settled on was that crime is learned. Through relationships with others, future offenders learn motives, values, techniques, and rationalizations. He set it out starkly: “Those who become white collar criminals generally start their careers in good neighborhoods and good homes, graduate from college with some idealism, and, with little selection on their part, get into a particular business situation in which criminality is practically a folkway, and are induced into that system of behavior.”

The same is true for street-level criminals as well, though they are introduced to a different situation. Professors Pierce and Snyder found that individuals inside business organizations tend to reflect the conduct around them, and their adherence to moral principles will get stronger if they are working in a unit where that is the culture, but fade away if they are transferred to a unit with lower adherence on display. Most major investment banks, as an example, have such a track record of criminality over the years that one can easily see how Sutherland’s hypothesis might well apply to any who go to work there.

As one gains more money and more power, a sense of entitlement can arise that may convince people that they deserve the rewards they can garner through fraud and other white collar wrongdoing. In one experiment, psychologists divided cars into 5 categories, running from the cheapest and crappiest to the best and most expensive. They then monitored an intersection in California where pedestrians have the right of way to see what would happen when a pedestrian entered the cross-walk as cars approached. Every driver of the lowest category of cars yielded to the pedestrian. In the middle category, 30% cut off the pedestrian. And roughly 50% of the drivers of the fanciest cars broke the law and refused to defer to the pedestrian. Wealth breeds entitlement which breeds wrongdoing. “Extreme wealth is criminogenic,” says Taub.

And because of the concept known as the tangible & the abstract , it is easier to commit and rationalize most white collar crimes as compared to blue collar crimes, because the victims are not right there in front of the wrongdoer as they would be in a robbery, but are more of an abstract notion. As Taub writes:

We cannot simply rely on the good conscience of executives to do the right thing. For them, victims are invisible at best…White collar crime differs from violent crimes; for example, with violent crime it’s easy to see who the perps and the victims are in real-time, face-to-face encounters. When the crooked schemes are more complex, involving numerous players inside of a large business organization and taking place over a long period of time in many locations, finding the crime and the victims is fuzzier.

Professor Eugene Soltes of the Harvard Business School who developed relationships with many prominent white collar criminals and interviewed them in their jail cells reached a similar conclusion regarding the role of the tangible and the abstract:

White-collar crime is not like most other criminal offenses.  To steal someone’s wallet, you need to get close to that person, though their physical belongings, and see their harried reaction as they realize their wallet is gone. It is a physically intimate affair.  I spent a lot of time around convicted felons who had stolen many millions of dollars through their actions, but I never once worried about one of them reaching into my back pocket to steal my wallet.  As reasonably socialized individuals, they would have instinctively avoided such an offense.  However, for most white-collar crimes, the harm created by a dab of a pen or an adjustment on a spreadsheet does not require getting close to individuals.  The victims are physically and psychologically distant. In some cases, like insider trading, the victims might not even be identifiable.  As a result, perpetrators of white collar offenses do not experience the same gut feelings of doing harm that kept my interviewees from reaching for my wallet.

Why does our criminal justice system extend mercy to white collar criminals much more frequently than to blue collar criminals?  On the face of things, a poor person trying to make ends meet who commits a street crime seems morally more sympathetic than a comfortably well-to-do person who lies, cheats, and steals in order to become even richer, but that’s not what we see in our criminal justice system. Sympathy seems to be reserved primarily for the white collar criminals because they are most commonly white and financially comfortable and therefore have much more in common with the prosecutors and judges who generally run the legal system, as well as the governors and presidents who hand out the pardons. The in-group/out-group bias causes those who run the system to give any breaks disproportionately to those who look and/or live like them—the white collar criminals. Taub provides numerous examples of judges giving white collar criminals–who just happen to share their own skin collar, social class, or both–lighter sentences because the defendants’ conviction or guilty plea has already caused them to suffer significant reputational damage. And the big majority of the beneficiaries of President Trump’s pardons have also been the wealthy and well-connected.

Big Dirty Money is an insightful and discomforting book about white collar crime and its unfortunate impact on our society.

Cara Biasucci & Robert Prentice, Behavioral Ethics in Practice: Why We Sometimes Make the Wrong Decisions (2021).

John C. Coffee, Jr., Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement (2020).

Brandon L. Garrett, Too Big to Jail (2014).

Lamar Pierce & Jason Snyder, “Ethical Spillovers in Firms: Evidence from Vehicle Emissions Testing,” 54 Management Science 1891 (2008).

Paul Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” 109 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 4086 (2012).

Eugene Soltes, “Teaching Versus Living: Managerial Decision Making in the Gray,” 41 Journal of Management Education 455 (2017).

James Stewart, “Getting Away with It: Why White Collar Crime is Rarely Punished,” New York Times , Nov. 29, 2020 (book review).

Jennifer Taub, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime (2020).

Kathleen Vohs et al., “Merely Activating the Concept of Money Changes Personal and Interpersonal Behavior,” 17 Current Directions in Psychological Science 208 (2008).

Conformity Bias:  https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/conformity-bias

In-group/Out-group:  https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/in-groupout-group

Self-serving Bias: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/self-serving-bias

The Tangible and the Abstract: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/tangible-abstract

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Articles on White collar crime

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Why Do White-Collar Criminals Do It?

Former Tyco CEO and infamous white-collar criminal L. Dennis Kozlowski recently ended his parole

Former Tyco CEO and infamous white-collar criminal L. Dennis Kozlowski—the guy who once threw a $2 million birthday party while committing all manner of corporate fraud—recently ended his parole and claims to be thoroughly rehabilitated after spending more than six years in jail.

What would lead someone to do the kinds of things Kozlowski did? James William Coleman explored that question in a 1987 paper for the American Journal of Sociology.

Sociologist Edwin Sutherland invented the idea of white-collar crime in 1939 as a way to expand the concept of criminality beyond that era’s focus on illegal acts among immigrants and the working poor and apply it to the powerful. But Coleman writes that the justice system generally still treats white-collar crime more leniently than street crime.

And yet, Coleman writes, white collar crime “causes far more deaths and injuries than any other types of crime.”

Why do people like Kozlowski commit their crimes? Partly because they find ways to justify their behavior to themselves. Embezzlers tell themselves they’re just borrowing the money. Executives flaunting government regulations on worker safety or pollution dismiss those rules as unreasonable intrusions into the free market.Corporate managers who cheat their company’s clients say they’re just doing what the job—and their bosses—demand. Surveys show a majority of executives see unethical and even illegal behavior as standard in their industries, making it easy for some to commit misdeeds themselves.

At a more basic level, the motivation for white-collar crime is so simple we might not bother to think about it: making money. But Coleman suggests we look more closely at the “culture of competition” that emphasizes individual achievement and the pursuit of wealth and status.

We often see acquisitiveness and material competition as inherent human characteristics, but researchers have found they are irrelevant to hunter-gatherers and weak in agricultural societies. They became an increasingly important part of our motivation starting in the 17 th century, as capitalism and social mobility grew. A key element in white-collar crime is the overwhelming importance of the drive to succeed and the parallel fear of failure.

The question might then become why corporate crimes aren’t more universal. Coleman writes that the answer is social norms that prevent destructive economic behavior. But, as the survey results noted above suggest, these norms vary depending on the workplace and industry. Employees at one pharmaceutical firm who helped conceal studies showing dangerous side-effects of one of their company’s drugs “seemed to drive into the activity without thinking a great deal about it.”

Of course, there are other, external factors, including how much opportunity for criminal behavior a job provides, whether the workplace culture involves sharing information on how to commit crimes, the chance of getting caught, and potential criminal penalties involved. Like individual criminals’ behavior, these factors come back, to some extent, to ambiguous social norms that treat corporate malfeasance differently than other crimes. And that means that really addressing corporate crime could require deep cultural changes.

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Annual Review of Sociology

Volume 39, 2013, review article, white-collar crime: a review of recent developments and promising directions for future research.

• Sally S. Simpson 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 39:309-331 (Volume publication date July 2013) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071811-145546
• First published as a Review in Advance on May 01, 2013
• © Annual Reviews

White-collar crime is one of the least understood and arguably most consequential of all crime types. This review highlights and assesses recent (primarily during the past decade) contributions to white-collar crime theory (with special emphasis on critical, choice, and organizational theories of offending), new evidence regarding the sentencing and punishment of white-collar offenders, and controversies surrounding crime prevention and control policies. Several promising new directions for white-collar crime research are identified, as are methodological and data deficiencies that limit progress.

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• Article Type: Review Article

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