(feature article)

“Daddy, do you know any magic tricks?” “Daddy knows just only accounting tricks!”
(old joke)

“White collar” crimes are crimes that do not involve physical violence and are mainly related to financial matters.

“White collar” crimes include tax evasion and illegal transactions for the sale of various properties, financial scams and bribery, forgery of documents and fraud with the circulation of securities, real-estate fraud and illegal poisoning of the environment, mismanagement of the budget and appropriation of other people’s money and their property, etc.

Among all types of crime, this is perhaps the most economically damaging to modern society. The motive for these crimes is to obtain or avoid the loss of money, property or services, or to obtain a personal or business advantage.

This term was first used by criminologist Edwin Sutherland on December 27, 1939. Among the famous people convicted of “white collar” crimes in recent decades is Bernie Madoff.

Who is Bernie Madoff? Bernard Lawrence “Bernie” Madoff was the financial manager responsible for one of the biggest financial frauds to date. He implemented the largest Ponzi scheme in history, extorting tens of billions of dollars from thousands of investors for at least 17 years, and possibly longer. In 2009, Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison and forced to forfeit $170 billion. What is a Ponzi Scheme? The Ponzi Scheme is an investment scam in which clients are promised large returns with little or no risk. Companies that participate in the Ponzi scheme focus all their energy on attracting new clients for investment. This new income is used to pay the original investors their returns, marked as a profit from a legitimate transaction. Ponzi schemes rely on a constant stream of new investments to continue to generate income for old investors. When this flow ends, the scheme falls apart.