White-collar crimes have been at the forefront of society for quite a while now. Although white-collar crimes are not considered violent crimes, they are heinous nonetheless and just like other crimes, they are not victimless. A white-collar crime can destroy a business, ruin a person’s life (by wiping out all of their savings), can bring down investors who may lose millions or even billions of dollars and destroy institutions and people’s faith in those institutions.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is heavily involved in investigating white-collar crimes and their program concentrates on analyzing intelligence solving investigations. It is not uncommon for white-collar crimes to be connected to organized crime as well. The FBI’s investigations are conducted on regional, national and international levels.
Does the FBI work alone?
Although the FBI established a program to investigate white-collar crimes a long time ago, they partner with law enforcement and regulatory agencies, such as the:
- Securities and Exchange Commission
- Internal Revenue Service
- U.S. Postal Inspection Service
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission
- Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
What are some specific examples of white-collar crime?
There are several examples of white-collar crimes. Some of the types that you may have heard discussed on the news are:
- Health care fraud: Health care fraud affects many people and businesses. It costs tens of billions of dollars each year. It also caused insurance premiums to increase and can cause taxes to go up. Many different people can commit health care fraud, such as medical providers, patients and other people who knowingly fool the health care system so that they can collect illegal benefits or money. The FBI is the primary agency that investigates this type of white-collar crime.
- Corporate fraud: The FBI is the principal agency that investigates this type of fraud as well. The FBI focuses on cases that involve accounting schemes and corporate executives who self-deal. They also investigate obstruction-of-justice cases. Within their investigations of corporate fraud, the mostly focus on financial information that has been falsified (false accounting, trades that are fraudulent in order to inflate profits and conceal losses, and illicit transactions that are built to not be noticed by regulatory investigations) and self-dealing by corporate insiders (insider trading, kickbacks, corporate property that has been misused for personal gain and individual tax violations).
- Money laundering: With money laundering, the money launderers take money that has been obtained through criminal activity and create a perception that it has been obtained legitimately. Money laundering lets criminals hide and gather wealth, escape prosecution, not pay taxes, increase their profits through reinvesting and support additional criminal activity. The FBI pays special attention to professional money launderers, people who facilitate money laundering activity, gatekeepers and financial institutions that are involved.
How do money launderers make so much money?
Some of the sources of their money from money laundering are from complicated financial crimes, health care fraud, national and international corruption, human trafficking, drug trafficking and terrorism. They use many different tools to make the money “clean,” such as financial institutions, precious metals, international trade, real estate and virtual currency.
There are also other types of white-collar crimes, such as securities and commodities fraud, mortgage and financial institution fraud and intellectual property theft/piracy. Those crimes are just as serious and just as illegal.
The solid advice of an Indiana criminal defense attorney may prove most helpful
If you have been charged with a white-collar crime, the experienced advice of an Indiana criminal defense attorney may really make a tremendous difference in your case and the outcome may be much less painful than you expect. Your attorney can walk you through the process and explain to you what you can expect while helping you to protect your rights at the same time.