White Collar Crime

A white collar crime is a crime that serves as an umbrella over a large assortment of other crimes that all have to deal with gaining profit via lies and deceit.  The different crimes that would be included under this umbrella include, but are not limited to: securities fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement, insider trading and laundering.  However, the most common type of white collar crime is securities fraud.

  • Securities Fraud

–        Securities fraud is insider trading, where one individual who has inside information about another individual or organization gives that information to someone else without the consent of the original party.  Another type of security fraud is where an individual invests in a company, while deliberately lying about the company’s finances to the general public and/or law enforcement.  This means that an investor or entrepreneur who invests money based on incorrect information did not commit the securities fraud, but that the individual or group who convinced him or her to do so committed securities fraud.

  • Embezzlement

–        Embezzlement is another white collar crime.  The frightening part about it is that even lawyers and attorneys can use embezzlement on their own clients.  Embezzlement is where an individual illegally takes money from a person that they owe money to.  Therefore, if a lawyer works for their clients, if they steal money from them they have just committed embezzlement.

  • Money Laundering

–        Money laundering is where an individual illegally gets money and filters it through a series of transactions to the point that the money appears clean.  The funds would be first placed into a bank, and then divided and sent to other accounts through many different transactions, and then combined with clean money.  These funds could be used for a variety of different reasons: investing, sending, saving, donating, you name it.

  • Tax Evasion

–        Another serious white collar crime is tax evasion, which is the last one we’ll discuss.  Tax evasion is where an individual or organization uses means to avoid taxes that they owe, hence the name ‘tax evasion.’  Tax evasion is fairly straightforward but also complicated: you write incorrect information on tax forms illegally to get out of pay taxes.  There are numerous ways for how you could put this information on tax forms r where you could get the information from, but nonetheless, the penalties for tax evasion are very harsh.