By Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Fraud is one of the most prosecuted crimes in the United States, yet scholarly and journalistic discourse about fraud and other financial crimes tends to focus on the absence of so-called “white-collar” prosecutions against wealthy executives. This Article complicates that familiar narrative. It contains the first nationwide account of how the United States actually prosecutes financial crime. It shows—contrary to dominant academic and public discourse—that the government prosecutes an enormous number of people for financial crimes and that these prosecutions disproportionately involve the least advantaged U.S. residents accused of low-level offenses. This empirical account directly contradicts the aspiration advanced by the FBI and Department of Justice that federal prosecution ought to be reserved for only the most egregious and sophisticated financial crimes. This article argues, in other words, that the term “white-collar crime” is a misnomer.

To build this empirical foundation, the Article uses comprehensive data of the roughly two million federal criminal cases prosecuted over the last three decades matched to county-level population data from the U.S. Census. It demonstrates the history, geography, and inequality that characterize federal financial crime cases, which include myriad crimes such as identity theft, mail and wire fraud, public benefits fraud, and tax fraud, to name just a few. It shows that financial crime defendants are disproportionately low-income and Black, and that this overrepresentation is not only a nationwide pattern, but also a pattern in nearly every federal district in the United States. What’s more, the financial crimes prosecuted against these overrepresented defendants are on average the least serious. This Article ends by exploring how formal law and policy, structural incentives, and individual biases could easily create a prosecutorial regime for financial crime that reinforces inequality based on race, gender, and wealth.

Northwestern Law & Econ Research Paper Forthcoming, outhern California Law Review, Vol. 97, 2024, 54 pages

By Courtney Semisch

This publication provides data on the broad variety of economic crime sentenced under §2B1.1.  The Commission undertook a project to systematically identify and classify the myriad of economic crimes sentenced under §2B1.1 using offenders' statutes of conviction and offense conduct. The Commission used this two-step methodology to assign the 6,068 offenders sentenced under §2B1.1 in fiscal year 2017 to one of 29 specific types of economic crime. This publication provides, for the first time, data from this new project as well as a brief description of the study's methodology.

Washington, DC: United States Sentencing Commission, 2019. 87p.

By Courtney Semisch

For the first time, this report provides in-depth criminal history information about federal economic crime offenders, combining the most recently available data from two United States Sentencing Commission projects. Key findings are that the application of guideline criminal history provisions differed among the different types of economic crime offenders. Also, The extent of prior convictions differed among the different types of economic crime offenders. Federal economic crime offenders did not “specialize” in economic crime. The severity of criminal history differed for offenders in the specific types of economic crime. Only about one-quarter of federal economic crime offenders with prior convictions were not assigned criminal history points under the guidelines.

Washington, DC: United States Sentencing Commission, 2020. 56p.

By The Asian Racing Federation Council on Anti-illegal Betting & Related Financial Crime

The purpose of this report is to explain how blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are being used in the illegal betting industry in Asia. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been widely adopted in the betting industry in the form of payments, betting applications built on blockchain technology and to move funds. The emergence of this technology is a threat to legal betting because of the intrinsic features of many cryptocurrencies, such as: facilitating avoidance of anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) procedures by betting operators; circumvention by operators of international betting regulatory and licensing requirements; and instantaneous and anonymous cross-border transactions from bettors and operators. All of these features are attractive to bettors and operators in jurisdictions where online betting is illegal and/or restricted. Regulators in many jurisdictions have also been slow to keep up with the growth of blockchain,1 creating loopholes exploited by organised crime. International law enforcement and anti-money laundering bodies have highlighted that blockchain and cryptocurrencies facilitate illicit activities including illegal betting and money laundering. 2 As a measure of the growth of cryptocurrency in betting, Bitcoin is now accepted on at least 127 offshore sports betting websites and 284 online casinos, which is a seven- and 13-fold increase respectively since 2018.3 In addition to Bitcoin, at least 780 offshore websites accept one or more of the five biggest cryptocurrencies,4 and most of these websites accept players from jurisdictions such as Hong Kong (83%), Australia (78%), Japan (92%) and Singapore (82%). 5 Cryptocurrencies further facilitate illegal betting by giving the operators of illegal bookmaking syndicates and related entities such as Macau casino junket operators a means of transferring money without detection in order to offshore the criminal proceeds of their illegal betting operations, settle payments with customers, and pay employees in overseas illegal betting hubs such as the Philippines. For these reasons they have also been enthusiastically adopted by entities linked to the junket industry.

The Asian Racing Federation Council. 2021. 12p.

By BIS OXFORD ECONOMICS

The consumption of Illicit tobacco has become a substantial problem for Australia in recent years. With illicit tobacco offering higher profit margins than illegal drugs such as cocaine, it presents several significant problems for government and society, including: - depriving the government of tax revenues, reducing its ability to deliver basic services and valuable social programmes; - displacing legal activity within the retail, wholesale and logistics industries; and - corrupting institutions, enabling money laundering, and providing revenues for organised crime, including potentially financing terrorist activities. This study by BIS Oxford Economics, commissioned by British American Tobacco Australia (BATA), provides information on several key issues, namely: - assessment of the value of the legal supply chain; - estimation of the tax and industry; - legal economy losses to illicit operators; and - examination of the harms caused by illicit tobacco trade

Sydney: BIS Oxford Economics, 2021. 43p.

By Richard Walton, Sophia Falkner and Benjamin Barnard

Research by Policy Exchange finds that fraud and error during the COVID-19 crisis will cost the UK Government in the region of £4.6 billion. The lower bound for the cost of fraud in this crisis is £1.3 billion and the upper bound is £7.9 billion, in light of total projected expenditure of £154.3 billion by the Government (excluding additional expenditure announced in the 8th July 2020 Economic Update). The true value may be closer to the upper bound, due to the higher than usual levels of fraud that normally accompany disaster management.

London: Policy Exchange, 2020. 78p.

By Ndiva Kofele-Kale

In the last decade a new tool has been developed in the global war against official corruption through the introduction of the offense of "illicit enrichment" in almost every multilateral anti-corruption convention. Illicit enrichment is defined in these conventions to include a reverse burden clause which triggers an automatic presumption that any public official found in "possession of inexplicable wealth" must have acquired it illicitly. …Combating Economic Crimes therefore sets out to address what has been left unanswered by these multilateral conventions, to wit, the level of burden of proof that should be placed on a public official who is accused of illicitly enriching himself from the resources of the State, balanced against the protection of legitimate community interests and expectations for a corruption-free society. The book explores the doctrinal foundations of the right to a presumption of innocence and reviews the basic due process protections afforded to all accused persons in criminal trials by treaty, customary international law, and municipal law. The book then goes on to propose a framework for balancing and ‘situationalizing’ competing human rights and public interests in situations involving possible official corruption.

Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. 248p.

By Harold Winter

Since Gary Becker’s seminal article in the late sixties, the economic analysis of crime has blossomed, from an interesting side field within law and economics, into a mature stand-alone sub-discipline that has been embraced by many well-respected academic economists. Wide ranging and accessible, this is the most up-to-date textbook in this area, taking current economic research and making it accessible to undergraduates and other interested readers. Without use of graphs or mathematical equations, Winter combines theory and empirical evidence with controversial examples from the news media.

London; Routledge, 2008. 146p.

By Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel

Meet the economic gangster. He’s the United Nations diplomat who double parks his Mercedes on a New York street at rush hour, because the cops can’t touch him-he has diplomatic immunity. He’s the dictator, the warlord, the black marketeers, the unscrupulous bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions of aid—and keeps many communities in a cycle of violence and poverty.

We can stop this waste of resources as we follow the foreign aid money trail, and find solutions that can make tremendous difference to the developing world, solutions that can range from cash infusions to diffuse violence in times of drought to guiding the World Bank away from programs most susceptible to corruption. Economic data, often found in unexpected places, can become potent tools in understanding how the global market really works and what is getting in the way of economic progress.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 256p.