Increasing Bank Fraud and Cyber Crimes

INTRODUCTION

According to Edwin Sutherland's definition, white-collar crime refers to a relatively uniform behaviour involving actions undertaken by individuals to contribute to the financial success of the organization. They violate the law for the firm. Yet the definition is loose. An offence would be called a white-collar crime insofar as it represents violation of a legal rule constructed to govern business affairs or occupational practice and insofar as the law violation took place as part of the conduct of regular business or occupational activities.

White-collar crimes are distinguished from the conventional crimes like murder, rape, and manslaughter etc. These crimes do not actually require any particular label of belonging to high status. Whereas, white-collar crimes are typically committed by the educated and the "high-class" society. In the increasing capitalistic tendencies across the globe, survival of the fittest becomes most applicable and in the race to survive, white-collar crimes evolve.

This project aims to highlight the increasing bank frauds committed through the Internet as the emerging white-collar crimes. The project first endeavours to explain the meaning of white-collar crimes, cyber crimes and corporate crimes and how they are interlinked with each other. Then there is a brief discussion about Internet crimes in the USA. This is followed by the example of the Mphasis-Citibank scam. The project concludes offering a few suggestions to control the rapid increase of bank frauds as cyber crimes.

WHITE COLLAR CRIMES, INTERNET CRIMES, CORPORATE CRIMES

In criminology, white-collar crime was defined by Edwin Sutherland "...as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation." Sutherland was a proponent of Symbolic Interactionism which examines the construction of personal identity through individual and group interactions. In defining the Differential Association Theory , he believed that criminal behaviour was learned from interpersonal interaction with others. White-collar crime therefore overlaps with corporate crime because the opportunity for fraud , bribery , insider trading , embezzlement , computer crime, and forgery is more available to white-collar employees.

Internet crime is crime committed on the Internet, using the Internet and by means of the Internet.

Computer crime is a general term that embraces such crimes as phishing , credit card frauds, bank robbery, Industrial espionage, child porn, kidnapping children via chat rooms, scams, cyberterrorism, creation and/or distribution of viruses, spam and so on. All such crimes are computer related and facilitated crimes.

With the evolution of the Internet, along came another revolution of crime where the perpetrators commit acts of crime and wrongdoing on the World Wide Web. Internet crime takes many faces and is committed in diverse fashions. The number of users and their diversity in their makeup has exposed the Internet to everyone. Some criminals in the Internet have grown up understanding this superhighway of information, unlike the older generation of users. Some crimes committed on the Internet have been exposed to the world and some remain a mystery up until they are perpetrated against someone or some company.

In criminology, corporate crime refers to crimes either committed by a corporation, i.e. a business entity having a separate legal personality from the natural persons that manage its activities, or by individuals that may be identified with a corporation or other business entity (see vicarious liability and corporate liability). This type of crime therefore overlaps with:

Ð'* white-collar crime because the majority of individuals who may act as or represent the interests of the corporation will be employees or professionals of a higher social class;

Ð'* organized crime because criminals can set up corporations either for the purposes of crime or as vehicles for laundering the proceeds of crime. Organized crime has become a branch of big business and is simply the illegal sector of capital. It has been estimated that, by the middle of the 1990s, the "gross criminal product" of organised crime made it the twentieth richest organisation in the world and richer than 150 sovereign states. The world's gross criminal product has been estimated at 20 percent of world trade.

Thus, to understand the increasing scams over the Internet, it becomes imperative to understand the above concepts. It can be seen that they are strongly interlinked and more than often, tend to be applied simultaneously.

BANK FRAUDS THROUGH THE INTERNET IN THE USA

Though a relatively new phenomenon, Internet bank fraud affects millions of Americans every year. Internet bank fraud occurs when one party deliberately deceives another through an Internet scam in order to achieve financial gain at the victim's expense. Criminal fraudsters are always looking for new ways to accrue financial gain at the expense of others, and the Internet is often their chosen means of scams and deception.

There are two major types of Internet bank fraud that are currently being committed against consumers worldwide. The first is called phishing . Phishing is defined as a fraudster's creation of emails and Internet websites that mimic legitimate business, financial institution, and government email and website pages, but are in fact designed to deceive. In the case of Internet bank fraud, criminals design and use emails and websites that look almost identical to bank's legitimate website.

When phishing is used as an Internet bank fraud tactic, there are several signs that consumers can identify and avoid when banking or completing any type of financial transaction over the Internet. Fraudulent emails and websites will often ask a client for personal information such as their PIN number, password or some other personal identification information. A legitimate bank will never ask for a customer's personal information in an email.

Phishing Internet bank fraud will often come in the form of attachments in an email that request personal banking or financial information. The best way to avoid this type of Internet bank fraud is to never provide personal banking information over the Internet when it is requested through an email. If you believe that you may have provided information over the Internet to an illegitimate source, it is important to contact