10 ways your White Collar staff are ripping you off!

White Collar Crimes_1White collar crime (WCC) refers to a financially motivated nonviolent crime committed by professionals in the course of their occupation.

A single scam can destroy companies, wipeout family savings, cost investors billions or all three like in the Enron case. It is important to keep vigilant, especially small business owners. WCC can take years to be discovered and even longer to gather the evidence to remove/prosecute the offender. Here are 10 ways your staff commit white collar crimes

Typical WCC:

  1. Fraud- Deliberate deception to secure unfair/unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.
  2. Bribery – Offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence actions/decisions
  3. Ponzi schemes – Fraudulent investment operation where returns are paid to investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned by the operator.
  4. Insider trading – Trading of a public company’s stock or other securities by individuals with access to nonpublic information about the company.
  5. Embezzlement – Withholding assets for the purpose of conversion (theft), by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes.
  6. Cybercrime – Offenses with a criminal motive to intentionally harm the reputation of the victim or cause physical or mental harm, or loss, to the victim directly or indirectly, using the Internet and/or mobile phones.
  7. Copyright infringement – Use of works protected by copyright law without permission, infringing on the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works.
  8. Money laundering – Transforming the proceeds of crime into legitimate money or other assets. In a number of legal and regulatory systems, the term money laundering has become conflated with other forms of financial crime, and sometimes used more generally to include misuse of the financial system including terrorism financing and evasion of international sanctions.
  9. Identity theft – While use of a pseudonym or alias is not necessarily unlawful, identity theft is the deliberate use of someone else’s identity, usually as a method to gain a financial advantage or obtain credit and other benefits in the other person’s name.
  10. Forgery – The process of making, adapting, or imitating objects, statistics, or documents with the intent to deceive for the sake of altering the public perception, or to earn profit by selling the forged item. Copies, studio replicas, and reproductions are not considered forgeries, though they may later become forgeries through knowing and willful misrepresentations.

While the true extent and cost of WCC are unknown, the FBI and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate the annual cost to be $300-$660 billion for the United States alone. It is estimated that a great deal of WCC is undetected or, if detected, not reported.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design is a well known crime prevention strategy. Although its main focus is street crime, its principles can be applied to WCC. Crime Prevention Through Awareness and Procedural Design, is a more appropriate system for preventing WCC. By creating a heightened level of awareness and procedures designed to combat these losses, a business can be better defend against WCC. This is where Procurementexpress.com comes in, get yourself a free trial or a demo here.

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