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The self-proclaimed “queen of IRS tax fraud”, Rashia Wilson, pleaded guilty to 57 charges related to tax fraud and a weapons violation. Authorities were alerted to her crimes by her Facebook posting, “IM’ A MILLIONAIRE FOR THE RECORD SO IF U THINK INDICTING ME WILL BE EASY IT WONT I PROMISE U!” With a seventh-grade education and a learning disability, she defrauded the IRS of millions of dollars (Silvestrini, 2013).
In March 2009, the 70-year-old Bernard (Bernie) Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 felonies, having previously run a Ponzi scheme for as many as 30 years. The sum total of estimated losses is largely unknown but ballpark estimates of the principle and promised returns approach $65bn (Henriques and Healy, 2009). The costs of Madoff’s crimes also include emotional and interpersonal damages directly resulting from victims’ financial losses (US v. Bernard L. Madoff, 2009).
White-collar criminals are diverse. From the most sophisticated market manipulations to the least complex embezzlements, the diversity in offenses may hinder our ability to understand white-collar offenders. This article seeks to add modern psychological theories to the theoretical conversation of white-collar offending. By so doing, Criminology will be better equipped to understand the myriad of psychological and sociological factors that influence white-collar crime.
Defining white-collar offending
For this article I will combine the FBI’s definition of white-collar crime (US Department of Justice, 1989) with elements offered by Shapiro (1990). White-collar offending will be defined as a nonviolent offense committed through reliance on the victim’s trust in the perpetrator or in the perpetrator’s supposedly legitimate organization, which is committed because the perpetrator violates that trust and yields financial gain. Each component of this definition is addressed below:
Trust component: Trust is “a psychological state of comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another” (Rousseau et al., 1998). Trust, by definition, leaves one party open to both positive rewards and exploitation, with a white-collar offense being able to occur because of the victim’s trust in the perpetrator or in the perpetrator’s supposedly legitimate organization.
Breach of trust component: Once a trust relationship is established, the offense will be committed through a breach or violation of that trust. This happens when the trustee, the...