Increasing Bank Frauds 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