Why Do We Commit White Collar Crimes?

“Money, the pure motivation and reasoning behinds the acts of committing white collar crimes” (Coenen). Tracy Coenen states that white-collar crimes are always financially motivated and the motivation for the person or persons committing the crime is almost always the end goal of a big payout. The Federal Bureau of Investigation official website places insurance fraud, identity theft, health care fraud, counterfeiting, bank fraud, and ponzi schemes as the most frequent and dangerous on its list of white-collar crimes. Day by day white-collar crimes become more sophisticated than imaginable and are starting to occur on a regular basis all over the world. Although white-collar crimes are nonviolent, it’s now become just as dangerous where even a

Long term prison sentences are usually associated with the worst crimes such as rape and murder, however now things are changing and a first time nonviolent offender can be put behind bars serving life sentences. If a committed white-collar crime is very wrong, the culprit can easily expect to receive life or a long period of time in prison. Notable examples of this are Jeffrey Skilling, 55, who was the CEO of Enron, he was convicted on counts of fraud and insider trading and received 24 years in jail. The biggest example though would have to be Bernie Madoff, 71, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison after he admitted to scamming thousands of investors out of billions of dollars in a Ponzi Scheme that made headlines. Walter Pavlo of Forbes exclaims "The public hardly batted an eye at those prison terms due to the harm done, billions of dollars lost, and to so many thousands of people over long periods of time" (Pavlo). White-collar crimes cause a lot of damage and the culprits committing the crimes just going to jail and rotting behind bars isn't good enough for a lot of the people who