Free College Essays-White Collar Crime Of All Time

The Worst Crime of All Time

White collar crime was a phrase that I was oblivious to, the meaning held no significance to me. Until one day I watched the movie The Big Short, a novel by the famous financial journalist Michael Lewis that was put into motion picture by Adam McKay. After watching this brilliant movie, thousands of questions arose in my head. I instantly became curious to learn more about this phrase, white collar crime. This is the moment when I decided to explore the question, why is white collared crime acceptable in some scenarios in the United States? The findings are unbelievable.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, white collar crime is a crime that is committed by business and government professionals; these crimes consist of lying, cheating and stealing. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation states, “It is not a victimless crime, a single scam can destroy a company, devastate families by wiping out their savings, or cost investors billions of dollars” (“White Collar Crime”). These crimes affect everyone in the United States, from the working class, to the middle and upper classes. The most common types of white collar crime consist of embezzlement and insider trading (“White Collar Crime”).

In a recent survey, conducted by myself, a group of people were asked the following question: If you could steal a million dollars and not

get penalized, would you steal the money? Now take a few moments and answer this question yourself. The offer seems quite appealing, and the results reflect. Every person that took my survey responded that they would indeed take the large chunk of cash and run freely. The subjects in my experiment cannot be blamed. A million dollars in today’s society can buy a lot of nice things: cars, boats, luxurious clothes, even a college education for the kids. Personal morals and values sometimes are tossed out the window when it comes down to dollar signs.
The first type of white collar crime to step into the limelight is embezzlement. The easiest way to define this crime is to say one synonym – stealing (“Embezzlement”). Embezzlement occurs everywhere. Stated by Cornell University Law School, personally owned businesses, banks, hedge funds, and large corporations are the main locations where embezzlement occurs (“Embezzlement”). One location that was left out of the main discussion was government sites. You may be thinking, wait hold on, government sites? Yes, unfortunately government sites experience a lot of cases of embezzlement. The even more unfortunate thing is the money the person is stealing usually is tax payer money (“White Collar Crime”). With that being said, everyone essentially is getting robbed of some amount of money.
Money usually is not taken bluntly, therefore, typically there is a mysterious scheme that is created to steal money secretively. We have to remember that these people committing these crimes are most of the time highly intelligent (“Embezzlement”). On a side note, when I say intelligent, I mean Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergrad and Harvard MBA kind of smart. With nothing more needed to be said, these people committing these crimes aren’t you average Joes. These schemes that these genius people create are absurdly complex.
Stated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, a Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors (“Fast Facts”). Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in opportunities claimed to generate high returns with little or no risk (citation). In many Ponzi schemes, the fraudsters focus on attracting new money to make promised payments to earlier-stage investors to create the false appearance that investors are profiting from a legitimate business. (“Fast Answers”)
Robert Lenzner, a National Editor of Forbes Magazine states that, the Bernie Madoff embezzlement scandal that occurred in 2008 will go down as one of the biggest financial scandal ever (“Eight Years of Madoffs”). Bernie Madoff created the largest Ponzi Scheme to so far exist; the scheme lasted an astonishing 18 years. The Ponzi scandal began in the early 1990’s, Madoff had a brilliant plan that would bring in mega dollars. Madoff’s company offered large returns to stock holders, in a small interval of time. The investors were not receiving cuts of money generated by the company, they were receiving just the other investors investments. Madoff took the investors money, then took a small cut, and passed it along to other investors. This caught interest of millions of people, high returns in a short amount of time is what every stock holder dreams of. When the dust finally settled, and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme finally was discovered and dismantled, Madoff acquired upwards of 50 billion dollars, not a bad chunk of change for a counterfeit company. (“Eight Years of Madoffs”)
Moving on, insider trading is a white collar crime that a majority of people are oblivious to. The extremely wealthy businessmen and businesswomen of America have access to a lot more information than the general public has access to. It is not illegal to possess critical information, however, it is highly illegal to use this inside knowledge to collect compensation through stock trading. The vast majority of people using the stock market gain their information through reading newspapers, articles, magazines, and online blogs. Furthermore, there is a small percentage of people who receive non public information from inside sources and use that information to buy stocks. Insider trading is highly illegal; surprisingly though, few people are caught (“Knowing Too Much”). The reason that so few people are caught is due to the fact that these people committing these crimes are extremely wealthy business people (“Knowing Too Much”). It almost sounds like the rich have a scary amount of power in America, maybe even more than our government (“Knowing Too Much”).
Everyone knows the famous Martha Stewart, the successful businesswoman that had her own television show on home living. In contrast, few people would of guess Martha Stewart had ties to a huge insider trading scandal. In December 2001, Martha Stewart committed the white collar crime of insider trading. Walking through the phases of this crime, began when Martha Stewart purchased 3928 shares of ImClone stock (“Martha Stewart’s Insider Trading Case: A Practical Application of Rule 2.1”). Coincidently, one of Martha’s close friends was the owner of the company ImClone. Moving on, ImClone was in the process of putting an extremely profitable cancer drug on the market, unfortunately, this drug never was approved by the federal government and failed to go on the market (“Martha Stewart’s Insider Trading Case: A Practical Application of Rule 2.1”). The result of this was tragic, the company ImClone was projected to take a huge financial hit and the public stock prices were predicted to plummet. Prior to the stock price crashing, Martha Stewart was then given an illegal forewarning to sell her stocks in ImClone. Finally, detectives pieced the puzzle together and discovered Martha Stewart’s scandal; she was then sentenced to 5 months in jail, and was nailed with a huge fine of 30,000 dollars (“Martha Stewart’s Insider Trading Case: A Practical Application of Rule 2.1”).
An experiment I conducted highlights key theories to why white collar crime seems to be acceptable in some scenarios in the United States.

To begin with, the experiment I conducted began with four participants viewing pictures of five criminals. The participants were given no background information on the five people in the pictures. Next, the participants were asked to order the pictures one through five, based on severity of crime these people supposedly committed. 1 being the most server, 5 being the least severe. After the four participants completed the experiment, the actual results were

released.
The participants had similar results, all of them ordered the pictures an easy pattern. Each participant ordered the pictures based on appearance. The roughest and toughest looking criminals were ordered at the front, and the clean cut criminals were ordered last. When I finally debrief the case, the look on the participant’s faces were priceless. I told the participants that the order they arranged the criminals was completely backwards. The roughest and toughest guys had committed small crimes such as parking tickets, and jay walking. In contrast, the clean cut guys committed crimes such as embezzlement and money laundering.
The experiment that was conducted speaks greater volumes than what it was worth. This one experiment goes to show how judgments and lack of information, result in a negative outcome. Many people in America instill their trust in people based off of appearance and stature in society. These qualities that so many people base their trust upon others on is wrong, and inaccurate. Good looks and a solid education do not speak about a person’s character and honesty. So, next time you give someone your full trust, make sure that their actions are the reason you are trusting them, not their thousand-dollar suit and degree from Harvard.