White-collar crime

White-collar crime  (Crime,  Corruption)
Interest of	Jürgen Roth
Crimes by mostly well educated people in often higher social status.

White-collar crime is financially motivated, not directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals, committed through deceptive practices. It overlaps with corporate crime. While not violent and for some time not viewed as serious by society at at large, these crimes are today thought of as: "just as severe and devastating as street crimes".

It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as:

"a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation"

White-collar criminals usually occupy a professional position of power and/or prestige, and one that commands well above average compensation. A considerable percentage of white-collar offenders are gainfully employed middle-aged Caucasian men who usually commit their first white-collar offense sometime between their late thirties through their mid-forties and appear to have middle-class backgrounds.

White-collar crimes could may include:

• wage theft
• fraud
• bribery
• Ponzi schemes
• insider trading
• labor racketeering
• embezzlement
• cybercrime
• copyright infringement
• money laundering
• identity theft
• forgery
• blackmail

External links

• FBI - White-Collar Crime
• Northcentral University - 5 Most Common White Collar Crimes
• Cornell - White-collar crime
• Slate - A Failure of Feminism: Women Are Being Systematically Excluded From White-Collar Crime

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Deepwater Horizon	An ecologically disastrous oil spill
Insider trading	Trading for your own benefit with knowledge only few have.
Lübeck disaster	Worst case, whereby the vaccine was contaminated with the bacteria (tuberculosis) that caused the disease.
Pay to play

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
"COVID-19/Vaccine"	“For us therefore, we're really taking that leap [to drive innovation] – us as a company, Bayer – in cell and gene therapies [...] ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say: if we had surveyed two years ago in the public – ‘would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?’ – we would have probably had a 95% refusal rate,”	Stefan Oelrich	24 October 2021

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References

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