White-collar crime costs society 20x as much as street crime | Hacker News Reader

White-collar crime costs society 20x as much as street crime

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46 pointsevilotto28 comments

This is content marketing for business insurance.

> Article: By comparison, common crimes like burglary, larceny and theft cost just $16 billion per year. (FBI)

> FBI: Collectively, victims of property crimes (excluding arson) suffered losses estimated at $16.4 billion in 2018.

Those aren't the same statistic. The cost of property (or any other kind of) crime is the sum of the losses plus the cost of prevention. If typical prevention costs more than is lost (the security industry is estimated at over 200B by some sources), then that figure should be compared to the combined security+loss cost of white collar crime. I don't think the ratio will get particularly close to 1, but it should shrink from 20.

Also,

> Article: Three-quarters of white-collar criminal offenders are white males.

A majority of the $300B figure computed by the FBI is in the form of foreign economic espionage and (not-necessarily-domestic) IP theft. I'm going to doubt that the major players in that are overwhelmingly white men.

The article (edit: apparently an extended ad) appears to have been written with a conclusion in mind before the facts were cherry picked sans context to support it.

The externalities for street crime are huge. A home is burglarized for $1000 and the whole neighborhood will experience much lower quality of life after the crime.

The externalities for white-collar crime are enormous. Wage theft against workers reduces their wages and creates a culture where unpaid work is expected, along with many other exploitations; and, their lower wages often result in people struggling to survive.

I would much rather live in a safe area with unpaid overtime. I like my job. Worse for people who don't. I do think we should go much harder on white-collar crime, without relativizing street crime.

Have you considered that those white collar crimes may help create an environment where people are more likely to commit those other crimes? Not paid enough? Steal! Overworked and no more joy in life? Go get an addiction and that vice results in harming others, and so on.

The numbers are all over the place. The white-collar offenses include things like credit card theft, money laundering and counterfeiting, all things that also exist in street crime. It also include intellectual property theft/piracy, and at that point we can basically just make up any number we want.

Another strange aspect to those numbers is when I look up the cost of crime in general. Most of the total numbers I find cites trillions. Remove street crime and white-collar crime, and there is trillions still left unaccounted for.

There is also a lot of uncertainty in how they determine the number for white-collar crime. Looking at studies there are multiple angles, with one study splitting it into:

    Victim costs
    Criminal justice system costs
    Crime career costs (criminal’s choice to engage in illegal rather than legal)
    Intangible costs (Indirect losses suffered by crime victims)

Based on that it is very difficult to compare a crime like insider trading with assault, since how you determine each of those categories is going to significant change the numbers. Drug crime for example has very high or very low cost to society depending on how one count, primarily because criminal justice system costs and crime career costs are both high while the others are fairly low or non-existent (depending on political views).

The article does not mention the words "street crime". Can this title be changed to the original title.

(HN title when I posted this comment is "White-collar crime costs society 20x as much as street crime").

HN guidelines...

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

Point 33 compared to point 35

They are not comparing the same form of costs. Point 33 is the cost to US as a nation, which involve everything from the wages and building that support the legal system, prisons, and IP loss from things like foreign economic espionage.

Point 35 is only the losses that victims of property crimes has (excluding arson).

If we use the same metric in both cases the losses from victims of IP theft would be exactly zero, and property crimes would be infinitive larger in comparison.

It ia pretty clear that there is a class bias in the way crime is punished in most societies.

I like the Scandinavian idea of scaling certain fines (e.g. for speeding) with the income of a person or at least introduce a point based system where you temporarily loose your drivers license when you you accumulated three points. Otherwise you have a society where the same wrongdoing destroys the existence of one person and barely bothers the other one outside of paying a (for them) small amount of money.

White collar crime is even worse in these regards. If you steal X units of currency from a cash register you will usually get more punishment than if you steal 1000X units of currency through some simple white collar scheme.

And that needs to be adressed.

Yet, would you rather be victim of fraud or a physical violent crime, like getting stabbed? But I get the point, put them all in jail for all I care.

“white collar” is too abstract. Lets compare say stealing a million from a cancer charity or “assault” which might be raising your hand for example.

Kicker: most of the white-collar crimes are committed against the state (as listed by their link to Cornell Law); does this insurance cover antitrust violations?

Or better yet, if they cover securities fraud, then I could make some very nice bets in the altcoin market. That's a type of insurance I'd love to buy.

I don’t even need the article. Of course it costs multiples more. No individual criminal (or local group) can even touch the amount of money made through manipulating the financial systems themselves.

What about Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", does policing based on money lead to good results?

How about we do the cost of lives? Lives lost to drugs and violence. White collar crime isn't killing your loved ones.

Really? https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=6521133&page=1

And that's a "visible" example. There are people who don't make the news who suffer greatly. Losing your life savings is economic death and in human society (at least today's), economic death is often tied to suicide because of how tied it is to your ability to survive / provide for your family.

No one is getting shot. But it definitely affects peoples lives.

Try to look up how financial security affects health.

If the Sackler family are ever successfully convicted of a crime it will be a white collar one. Their actions contributed to the more than half a million deaths from opioid abuse in the 2000s. There's your "drugs," as for your violence, we could start talking about the NRA lobbying to against gun death research, or, Halliburton's weapons in the early 2000s.

More financialized-capitalism BS.

Would you rather be swindled out of $1000 or violently assaulted and robbed of $990?

Yet defunding of white collar police like the IRS, CFPB, SEC, etc. is popular among many politicians.

Because too many of them get in power to avoid the time for those crimes.

That depends on how much value is assigned to every life lost or destroyed because of street crime.

We just print some more money.

Thats white collar legit

Washington State alone lost 1 Billion+ in 2020 to online fraud. I'm guessing the 20x estimate is low.

Does credit card number theft and shipping electronics to Romania wit those count as white collar crime?

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