White-Collar Crime Includes ScamsScams A Scam is a confidence trick - a crime - is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust through deception. Scams or confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, irresponsibility, or greed and exploiting that. Researchers have defined confidence tricks as "a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct ... intending to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial", as they "benefit con operators ('con men' - criminals) at the expense of their victims (the 'marks')". A scam is a crime even if no money was lost.
These crimes are not violent, but they are not victimless. White-collar crimes can destroy a company, wipe out a person’s life savings, cost investors billions of dollars, and erode the public’s trust in institutions.
The following are examples of White-Collar Crime
Online Financial Fraud
Of course, everyone online understands and knows about these. We will not explore these in this article, except to say that most forms of online scams fall into this category.
Corporate Fraud
These involve accounting schemes and self-dealing by corporate executives, as well as obstruction of justice (activities designed to conceal this type of criminalCriminal A criminal is any person who through a decision or act engages in a crime. This can be complicated, as many people break laws unknowingly, however, in our context, it is a person who makes a decision to engage in unlawful acts or to place themselves with others who do this. A criminal always has the ability to decide not to break the law, or if they initially engage in crime to stop doing it, but instead continues. conduct).
Fraud investigations primarily focus on:
- Falsification of financial information:
- False accounting and/or misrepresentations of financial conditions
- Fraudulent trades designed to inflate profits or hide losses
- Illicitillicit Illicit means something that is not legally permitted or authorized under the law; unlicensed; unlawful. It can also mean disapproved of or not permitted for moral or ethical reasons. transactions designed to escape regulatory oversight
- Self-dealing by corporate insiders:
- Insider trading (stock trading based on material, non-public information)
- Kickbacks
- Misuse of corporate property for personal gain
- Individual tax violations related to self-dealing
Money LaunderingMoney laundering Money laundering is the illegal process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions. Money laundering can be done through various mediums, leveraging a variety of payment vehicles, people and institutions.
Money laundering is turning “dirty” money “clean” by making it look like money from crimes actually came from legitimate sources.
Money laundering allows criminals to:
- hide and accumulate wealth
- avoid prosecution
- avoid taxes
- increase profits through reinvestment
- fund further criminal activity
These investigations on money laundering facilitation include: targeting professional money launderers, key facilitators, gatekeepers, and complicit financial institutions, among others.
Criminals who engage in money laundering derive their proceeds through:
- Complex financial crimes
- Health care fraud
- Human trafficking
- International and domestic public corruption
- Narcotics trafficking
- Terrorism
Criminals use a number of tools to launder money, including:
- Financial institutions
- International trade
- Precious metals
- Real estate
- Third-party service providers
- Virtual currency
- Buying and Selling Goods and Services
There are three steps in the money laundering process—placement, layering, and integration:
- Placement is the criminal entering money into the financial system.
- Layering is the most complex and often involves moving money internationally. Layering separates the criminal’s money from the original source and creates a complex audit trail through a series of financial transactions.
- Integration occurs when the criminal’s proceeds are returned to them from what appear to be legitimate sources.
These investigations regularly coordinate with multiple law enforcement agencies, international partners, and industry to detect and disrupt money laundering.
Securities and Commodities Fraud
The creation of complex investment vehicles and the tremendous increase in the amount of money being invested have created greater opportunities for individuals and businesses to create fraudulent investment schemes.
To investigate and help prevent fraudulent activity in the financial markets, the Bureau works closely with various government and private organizations to investigate securities and commodities fraud.
Mortgage and Financial Institution Fraud
Financial institution fraud happens when criminals target banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. Many schemes involve compromising customers’ accounts or personal information. Embezzlement and misapplication of funds are two common financial institution fraud crimes in FBIFBI FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, the FBI is also a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. A leading U.S. counter-terrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigative organization, the FBI has jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes, including financial fraud. investigations. Sometimes, fraud can be severe enough to cause the failure of a bank or credit union.
Mortgage fraud happens when someone lies to influence a bank’s mortgage decision or if a distressed homeowner is the victim of a fraud.
There are two areas of mortgage fraud:
- Fraud for profit: This type of fraud involves professionals in the home buying process stealing cash and equity from lenders and homeowners. These types of cases area priority for the FBI.
- Fraud for housing: This fraud happens when borrowers lie about their incomes or assets on a loan application or influence an appraiser to manipulate a property’s value.
To investigate mortgage and financial institution fraud cases law enforcement participates in task forces that share intelligence, de-conflict cases, and create joint investigations.
Intellectual Property Theft/Piracy
Intellectual property theft involves robbing people or companies of their ideas, inventions, and creative expressions—known as intellectual property. This can include everything from trade secrets to proprietary products to movies, music, and software.
Intellectual property theft costs U.S. businesses billions each year.
The FBI’s intellectual property investigations focus on the theft of trade secrets and copyright infringement on products that can impact people’s health and safety, like counterfeit parts for cars and electronics. The FBI works with partners in the private sector and other law enforcement agencies at all levels to investigate these cases.
Learn more at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center: http://iprcenter.gov/
Similarly, economic espionage costs the American economy hundreds of billions of dollars per year and puts our national security at risk. In these cases, foreign competitors deliberately target economic intelligence in advanced technologies and successful U.S. industries.
One thing that ImpersonationImpersonation An impersonator is someone who imitates or copies the behavior or actions of another. There are many reasons for impersonating someone, such as: part of a criminal act such as identity theft, online impersonation scam, or other fraud. This is usually where the criminal is trying to assume the identity of another, in order to commit fraud, such as accessing confidential information or to gain property not belonging to them. Also known as social engineering and impostors. Fraud Victims rarely employ is the removal of their stolen identities using complaints of copyright infringement. Once a publisher, platform, or app is notified of an infringement they must remove the infringing content (images) immediately (per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)
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Essential Tools For Every Scam SurvivorSurvivor A Scam Survivor is a victim who has been able to fully accept the reality of their situation. That they were the victim of a crime and are not to blame. They are working on their emotional recovery and reduction of any trauma either on their own, through a qualified support organization, or through counseling or therapy. And has done their duty and reported the crime to their local police, national police, and on Anyscam.com From SCARS Publishing
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SCARS GREEN BOOK
Self-Help Self-Paced Recovery Program Guide
LEARN HOW TO RECOVER ON YOUR OWN
This program is designed to help scam victims struggling to recover on their own and for those who want to understand the overall process. You can be using other resources, such as traumaTrauma Emotional and psychological trauma is the result of extraordinarily stressful events that shatter your sense of security, making you feel helpless in a dangerous world. Psychological trauma can leave you struggling with upsetting emotions, memories, and anxiety that won’t go away. It can also leave you feeling numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people. Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety or other emotional shocks, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and isolated can result in trauma, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized. Trauma requires treatment, either through counseling or therapy or through trauma-oriented support programs, such as those offered by SCARS. counselingCounseling Counseling is the professional guidance of the individual by utilizing psychological methods especially in collecting case history data, using various techniques of the personal interview, and testing interests and aptitudes. A mental health counselor (MHC), or counselor, is a person who works with individuals and groups to promote optimum mental and emotional health. Such persons may help individuals deal with issues associated with addiction and substance abuse; family, parenting, and marital problems; stress management; self-esteem; and aging. They may also work with "Social Workers", "Psychiatrists", and "Psychologists". SCARS does not provide mental health counseling. or therapy, qualified support groupsSupport Groups In a support group, members provide each other with various types of help, usually nonprofessional and nonmaterial, for a particular shared, usually burdensome, characteristic, such as romance scams. Members with the same issues can come together for sharing coping strategies, to feel more empowered and for a sense of community. The help may take the form of providing and evaluating relevant information, relating personal experiences, listening to and accepting others' experiences, providing sympathetic understanding and establishing social networks. A support group may also work to inform the public or engage in advocacy. They can be supervised or not. SCARS support groups are moderated by the SCARS Team and or volunteers., or completely independent – on your own!
The SCARS Steps program is a complete program and is provided for the purpose of helping scam victims to overcome this experience. Throughout this SCARS Steps Program, we speak about issues and challenges that a victim may have and help guide them through their recovery. But each person is different and it is important to understand your own reasons for being vulnerable to being scammed.
After the trauma of being scammed, you need to take steps to recover and move on. This may be an alternative to counseling in the short term, but we still encourage you to seek out professional help & support. Throughout this SCARS Steps Program, we speak about issues, challenges, defects, or problems that a victim may have in a generalized way.
The SCARS GREEN BOOK will help you recover from your scam offline and it will always be there when you need it!
SCARS SLATE BOOK – Let Us Explain What Happened!
A Guide For Families & Friends Of Scam Victims
HOW TO HELP ROMANCE SCAM VICTIMS FOR FAMILIES & FRIENDS OF SCAM VICTIMS
This SCARS Publishing book represents a complete guide to help the families and friends understand how these scams work and how to help the victim.
The SCARS Slate Book should be purchased by family and friends to better understand what happened to the victim and the traumatic impact on them. But it can also be shared by the victim so that they do not have to explain to family and friends about the scam. This publication is to help others to help Scam Victims to make it through this traumatic experience and recover.
Each person is different and it is important to understand how relationship scamsRelationship Scam A Relationship Scam is a one-to-one criminal act that involves a trust relationship and uses deception & manipulation to get a victim to give to the criminal something of value, such as money! Click here to learn more: What Is A Relationship Scam? work and why people are vulnerable; to being scammed, how they were lured in, then groomed and manipulated. This understanding is essential in helping them through the process of ending the scam and then on to recovery. The SCARS Slate Book will provide the information necessary to help support a victim through this process.
SCARS RED BOOK
Your Personal Scam Evidence & Crime Record Organizer
ORGANIZE YOUR INFORMATION TO MAKE THE REPORTING PROCESS SIMPLE!
Helps you get and stay organized. This publication is to help Scam Victims organize their crime information. Complete this information before reporting to the police then bring this book with you
Before or after reporting to the police the RED BOOK gives you a dedicated tool to record all the essential facts of this crime. The Victim, the Scammers, the Money, and your Police interactions. Everything that really matters can be easily recorded for your immediate use and for the future!
As we have seen, money recovery/repayment programs can become available years after the scam ends and you need to keep all the details of this crime in case it is needed. We have also seen scammers being extradited to the U.S. and other countries, this will help in the event you testify or give statements, Additionally, this helps you have your information ready to qualify for victims’ benefits, compensation, or aid.
The Official SCARS RED BOOK is your way of recording all the important facts of this crime so that you do not lose essential information, Complete the RED BOOK then put it away with the confidence that you will have it if or when it is needed.
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By the Society of Citizens Against Relationship ScamsSCARS SCARS - Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. A government registered crime victims' assistance & crime prevention nonprofit organization based in Miami, Florida, U.S.A. SCARS supports the victims of scams worldwide and through its partners in more than 60 countries around the world. Incorporated in 2015, its team has 30 years of continuous experience educating and supporting scam victims. Visit www.AgainstScams.org to learn more about SCARS. Inc.
A Worldwide Crime Victims Assistance & Crime Prevention Nonprofit Organization Headquartered In Miami Florida USA & Monterrey NL Mexico, with Partners In More Than 60 Countries
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To see ScammerScammer A Scammer or Fraudster is someone that engages in deception to obtain money or achieve another objective. They are criminals that attempt to deceive a victim into sending more or performing some other activity that benefits the scammer. Photos visit www.ScammerPhotos.com
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