Introduction
The crime of fraud is as old as human society is and only its forms change. Fraud could be a financial, economic, or corporate crime, which is executed by committing fraud or theft in a very skillful manner. The outcome of fraud would be a financial or economic loss for businesses, investors, and many others who may be affected by the crime committed by white-collar criminals. This theft could be financial, intellectual such as copyright ownership, or even that of physical property. Fraud in the strict economic sense however implies using unscrupulous means to acquire the money that does not belong to you.
A case in point is that of Frank Abgnale Jr. who at the age of 15 was already competent enough in the business of conning. This paper sets out to define white-collar crimes, give their examples using the case of Frank, and examine how to prevent this type of crime.
Crimes committed by the main character in the movie
The particular crimes committed were forgery, identity theft, and money laundry. Frank Abgnale forges Pan Am payroll check and succeeds in stealing over $ 2.8 million. He impersonates as a medical doctor, an attorney, a pilot, a secret service officer and a prosecutor. These activities are at times referred to as white-collar crimes because they involve profit-making through illicit business transactions. Such are defined as white-collar crimes. Many people who commit these crimes set up their business houses just to fool the general public. Determining the value of such crimes is almost not possible as people who undergo this trauma never come in the open to share their situations. Fraudsters grab excellent opportunities to become rich by applying impostor schemes such as of Frank.
Identity theft
The crime, in this case, is impersonation or identity theft. Frank has presented himself as a medical doctor, a pilot, a prosecutor and prison inspector. Crimes in this case are on the basis of stolen identities and more complex to handle in comparison to the other crimes even as the chance of success is greater when committing crimes related to identity theft. The stolen identity offers a cover up of anonymity that may be difficult to break into. While identity theft and crimes committed with the help of stolen identity may be decades old and hence not new to enforcement agencies.
However, unlike the crimes relating to identity theft in the past, the criminals have found the anonymity offered by new technologies to commit frauds in ingenious ways. As a consequence of pervasiveness of identity theft, and ease with which it can be committed as well as complexities involved in it for law enforcers, it is the number one crime among all consumer frauds and close to ten million people are likely to be victimized. Identity theft has far more ramifications for the victims than any other similar crime.
The monetary loss to the victim is perhaps the least painful among them all. The victim is not only rendered financially bankrupt in several cases but is also morally and socially demoralized. One, of the reasons the criminals accused of identity theft go unpunished is the lack of adequate legal mechanisms and loopholes that need to be plugged. Since then FBI and the government woke up to the urgency of tackling the menace of identity theft through stringent legal enforcements. However, greater deterrence must be put in place so that internet users might conduct their business transaction without fear and apprehensions; and terrorists and their links might be under the pressure of detection before defrauding innocent people.
Forgery
After committing crimes of identity theft Frank committed forgery to be able to steal money from various victims. Forgery committed by Frank cannot be viewed as something isolated from the identity theft as both ware present in every crime he committed. Instead, forgery must be viewed as something that is multidimensional as committed by Frank. There are times when what seemed like mere forgery impersonation had to follow. It is important to remember that identity theft comes in many shapes and forms and takes place for many reasons. Even when identity theft may appear to be senseless or irrational, chances are, there is someone who has a perfectly planned out reason as to why it was committed.
Money laundering
Frank managed to commit this type of crime while trying to clean up he had conned organizations. Money laundering is the criminal practice of filtering illegal money through a series of transactions, so that the funds can be justified from legal activities. Money laundering is determined by criminal activities and conceals the true source, ownership, or use of funds. In present scenario, there is a necessity to control money laundering by creating awareness among people, and to protect them from being victimized by genius fraudulent like Frank. Frank used various ways to commit this fraud and he developed the ability to escape from authority by adopting control measures.
Money laundering has dangerous consequences. It has the potential to weaken the financial system because of the sheer magnitude of the sums involved. It blows up corruption with the huge amounts of illegally obtained money in circulation. Money laundering also reduces government tax revenue and therefore obliquely harms honest taxpayers and declines legitimate job opportunities. Money launderers threaten the efforts of many countries to improve their economies through privatization. These criminal organizations are competent of outbidding legitimate purchasers of former state-owned enterprises.
Escape of Frank from the Law
When Carl Hanraty, an FBI bank fraud agent, was investigating Frank, Frank disguised himself as secret service officer, thereby disappearing with FBI car. This was the first escape. Frank then falls in love with a girl named Brenda and successfully organizes to elope with her. Later when tracked with his girlfriend Brenda in their wedding party, he detects the civilian dressed intelligence agents and flees to Europe. Not only, when sent to a twelve year imprisonment sentence, he disguises to be a prison inspector and manages to escape.
He then flees to Canada for a safe haven before his next arrest. Likewise, when being returned home from France to be jailed, he impersonates as a pilot and escapes to return to his home where he finds his mother, step father and half sister before he resigned to fate and got arrested. Besides on the Monday that Frank came late for work, on his first day to work given him by the FBI he could have escaped by simply not reporting to work. Additionally after he escaped from the plane during his return home for imprisonment, he could avoid going to his family home and take refuge elsewhere for safety (Ekblom, 38).
Prevention of the Fraud
It had been possible to create forgery-proof checks because this is what Frank did later in helping the FBI to prevent check forgery. Carl had to take the checks to the printer to check it authenticity. Such professionals should have been used in the banks before. This would have curtailed the crime beforehand, even though the inkling that they were fake checks had come from Frank himself. After Carl failed to arrest Frank at his wedding party and Frank escapes to Europe, Carl informs the boss and seeks the boss’ permission to pursue him there. The boss turns down the request but Carl proceeds all the same. He manages to arrest Frank with the aid of French security officers. He got the clue of Frank being in Montrichard from Paula, his mother, in a previous interview (Ekblom, 39).
From the above scenario, Mr. Carl was fighting a kind of personal lone-ranger battle against crime. This should not be the case since it gives criminals easy time to dodge the law. To prevent such loopholes, there must be cooperate effort against the war of fraud. The boss in our case should have accorded Carl full support by facilitating his pursuit of Frank. He should have even assigned Carl more officers and if possible help connect them to the security department of the suspect countries of Frank’s escape.
Preventive measures, though often intrinsically connected with the exploitive fight against money laundering, have a definitely different purpose from that of penal measures. It has been revealed that financial measures which focus on the role of financial institutions in the fight against money laundering can have two functions. Firstly, the type of financial anti-money laundering measure that was developed in the United States, the importance of which lies in the information that is provided to the government, both in terms of an instant intelligence flow through the imposition of reporting obligations and in terms of a database that financial institutions are enforced to maintain through record-keeping obligations.
The international financial anti-money laundering measures and the preventive legislations of most countries that have executed these international measures, amalgamate both functions. The financial legislation can furthermore be confusing as the application field of some domestic preventive legislation has been expanded to other than financial institutions and professions ((Ekblom, 40).
Detection of fraud
If forgery proof checks could be created then it follows such fraud cannot take place. Moreover the technology discussed above cannot give it room. However the legal framework also needs to tighten its belt. Money laundering has complex legislative issues that emerge from the initiation of e-money. It is a particular computer economic crime in which e-money laundering rests at the juncture of several different branches of law that include commercial, privacy, computer, banking, intellectual property and criminal law. The fight against money laundering focuses on effective enforcement of the criminal law in relation to profit-oriented crime.
The policies of money laundering provide a mechanism for the State to be better informed about the operation of markets and movements of money. Whilst criminal law was not amongst the first areas of law to attract attention of economic analysis, a good deal of attention is now turning to it (Ekblom, 40). The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 reinforced anti-money laundering efforts by increasing the levels of penalties and sanctions for money laundering crimes and by requiring strict classification and documentation of cash purchases of certain monetary instruments. Current laws and regulations are established to provide required information to businesses and consumers to facilitate government to combat certain financial crimes.
A powerful AML/CFT institutional framework that includes a broad scope of predicate offenses for money laundering helps to fight crime and corruption in general. When money laundering itself is made a crime; it provides another avenue to impeach criminals, both those who commit the underlying criminal acts and those who help out them through laundering illegally obtained funds. Similarly, an AML/CFT framework that includes bribery as a predicate offense and is enforced successfully provides less opportunity for criminals to bribe or otherwise corrupt public officials.
Money laundering can be curbed through implementing more effective enforcement of the criminal law in relation to profit-oriented crime. Criminal law instruments have created an impetus of their own. Many dominant steps have been taken at international level to counter money laundering. These include strong national leadership, new legislation, regulations and financial policies, international cooperation, and border control. Canada has implemented new legislation and regulations to control money laundering. These include modifications to the Criminal Code to criminalize money laundering and the introduction of record-keeping legislation to ease investigations and prosecutions.
With the amendments to the Code introduced by Bill C-95, police, prosecutors and courts have authority to deal with organized crime. Also, legislative amendments dealing with the creation of a mandatory suspicious transaction reporting system and cross-border controls are being considered. To control the transaction of illegal funds across Canada’s international border, Custom officers have power to search for and detain doubtful currency and other monetary instruments. Moreover, penalty for criminals could further be bloated to intimidate compromise of the law (Osborne and Wernicke, 156).
In the example used, twelve years in prison may not have sufficed Frank to learn a lesson. It is clear he deserved a more severe punishment. Moreover, security generally seems lazed since Frank easily escapes from one arrest to another and finds easy entry and hiding in other countries like France and Canada.
Modern Methods of Crime Prevention
Modern methods include producing forgery proof checks e.g. Banker’s checks. Additionally, a database of fingerprints is maintained to curb and contain fraudsters. CCTV technology has facilitated the filming of any dealers and their transactions. Computer systems can be set to sense and detect counterfeit checks and consequently reject them. Such technology involves computer software including the following.
Operating System (OS) fingerprinting is a process of determining the type of operating system that is running on a particular device. This is a technique that is both used by attackers and corporate security personnel. Attackers use OS fingerprinting in order to determine the operating system running on a target machine. Knowing about the OS makes it easier for malicious individuals or corporations to exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in some systems. Meanwhile, organizations also use OS fingerprinting to foil the attacks from different quarters. Systems security personnel should be aware of how attacks are being made on their systems to prevent intrusions into the system (Osborne and Wernicke, 120).
In preventing attackers from hacking an organization’s system, the systems administrators can either put in place foils or they can hide the OS. They need to determine the OS running on the machine that is trying to connect to an organization’s machine. Knowing the OS will allow the organization’s systems security personnel to launch a counterattack or to implement steps to prevent further intrusion. The second is to hide the organization’s OS from possible attacker and make it impossible for them to enter the system. There are several techniques that can be implemented to foil active OS fingerprinting applications from attackers.
In order to prevent the attack, it is important to determine the attributes of the target machine. Organizations can target their own systems first and determine from a remote machine the operating system on their systems. If they can identify the OS, they will know how attackers are going to get information. This will give security personnel the idea on how to hide it from attackers.
An interesting method to prevent crime is also to use a criminal to arrest another criminal since it take two to Tango. It is easier to set a thief in catching a thief since they understand each other’s ways better. The example of Frank here is a typical example of how effective this approach can be. Instead of Frank continuing in the illegal business of living on filthy lucre, he earns millions of genuine cash by helping the FBI in tracking fraudsters of his type. Also instead of wasting intellectual capacity of his type in prison for so long, it turns out to be beneficial to the nation as a whole. It is now possible to create more effective checks that even the monetary system of the country had never imagined possible, let alone trying (Gottschalk, 79).
Recommendation and Conclusion
In this age of technological growth and sophistication, the nature of financial crimes has also become more complex. Computers not only eased the job of tracing financial activities, they have also made it easier to trace any financial malpractices. This sophistication has brought the Financial Action Task Force in the forefront of efforts to counter money laundering. Certainly this is necessary since the impact of this vice is evident from the foregoing discussion. So it is necessary that every crime prevention officers must also undertake some Information, communication and Technology courses to make them more effective.
The ACTION model is a viable process model on which crime risk assessment and management is possible. It is a knowledge-management framework that can assist in capturing, assessment, synthesis, transfer and replication of evidence-based practice for identification of potential crime before a process model is implemented to prevent or mitigate the harm of criminal activities. It can be applied in any kind of criminal analysis and is not limited to opportunistic crimes because it is a model and not an end in itself.
The model has a promise of cost-effective and immediate approach to crime prevention. In using it however, the tasks should be moderated to be of value. For instance, excessive street lighting, though viable, may arouse concerns about large carbon footprint. On the contrary, poorly designed interventions in preventing crime such as fortifying the appearance of buildings may end up affecting community safety. In sum, the risk-based model is not only a sensible theoretical model but also a practical approach to controlling crime in a community (Osborne and Wernicke, 78).
Works cited
Ekblom, Paul. Future imperfect: Preparing for the crimes to come. Criminal Justice Matters 46 (2001/02), 38-40.
Gottschalk , Petter. “Knowledge management technology for organized crime risk assessment”. Information Systems Frontiers. 2009.
Osborne, Deborah., and Wernicke, Susan. Introduction to crime analysis: Basic resources for criminal justice practice. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, Inc., 2003.