White Collar Crimes

“White collar crimes” refer to typically non-violent criminal offenses that focus on obtaining an improper financial or legal benefit for the perpetrator, usually at the expense of victims. Common examples of white-collar crimes include:

• Embezzlement: A person commits embezzlement when they unlawfully convert money or property entrusted to the person by its owner.
• Money laundering: A person engages in money laundering when they use illicit funds in a series of transactions, usually combined with lawfully acquitted funds, to obscure the source of the illicit funds.
• Bribery: The offense of bribery involves offering or providing something of value to an official to induce them to take or refrain from taking official action or soliciting something of value as an official to take or refrain from taking official action.
• Identity theft: A person commits identity theft if they use an individual’s personally identifying information or financial information without the individual’s authorization or if they use fraudulently created personal information to obtain a financial or legal benefit.
• Forgery: A person may commit an offense when they alter a genuine document, create a false document (such as a contract or government record) intending to pass it off as an authentic document, or affix a person’s signature to a document without their authorization.
• Counterfeiting: The crime of counterfeiting involves creating false U.S. coins or paper currency with the intent to pass them off as genuine currency.
• Tax evasion: Individuals may face criminal prosecution by engaging in tax fraud designed to avoid local, state, or federal tax liabilities.
• Securities fraud: A person can commit a crime by violating various aspects of state or federal securities, such as knowingly providing false information to investors, engaging in insider trading and running Ponzi schemes.
• Bank fraud: White-collar offenses may involve various types of fraud against financial institutions, including check fraud, credit card fraud, or mortgage fraud. Bank fraud usually seeks to obtain money from a financial institution that does not belong to the perpetrator or that the perpetrator does not intend to repay.

White-collar charges can be tried in either state or federal courts. The federal government typically prosecutes white-collar crimes when they involve U.S. currency, the banking system, telecommunications systems (such as internet access), or public securities markets or occur across state or national borders. Otherwise, white-collar offenses can fall under state criminal prosecution. Federal versus state criminal prosecution for a white-collar defendant may involve several differences, including variations in potential penalties for conviction, distinct procedural rules, and the duration of the criminal prosecution.

A person charged with a white-collar offense may pursue various defenses to the prosecution’s case, such as:

• Lack of intent: A defendant may argue that they did not act with the degree of criminal intent (e.g., intentionally, willfully, knowingly) required by the charged statute.
• Consent/authorization: Defendants may assert that they acted with the alleged victim’s consent or authorization, such as taking property or using the alleged victim’s personal information.
• Mistaken identity: A defendant may argue that a victim or witness erroneously identified them as the perpetrator of the offense.
• Unlawful searches or interrogation: When the prosecution’s case involves evidence or inculpatory statements, a defendant may seek to exclude that evidence when the police obtained it through an unlawful search or an interrogation that violated the defendant’s rights.