Victims - White-collar Crime Victimization

The NCVS's focus on victimization by socalled street crimes to the neglect of white-collar or suite crimes reinforces the greater public attention accorded offenses generally committed by persons in the lower socioeconomic strata. Fraud and other white-collar crimes can visit severe economic and psychological hardships on their victims. Some white-collar crimes, such as medical malpractice and pollution, kill and maim large numbers of people. While the tally of street crimes dropped significantly during the last decade of the twentieth century, the number of white-collar crimes, enforcement officials believe, has increased greatly. Victim complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, jumped by 20 percent between 1996 and l998.

Fraud has been labeled assault with a fiscal weapon. A newspaper report tells of a bogus scheme in which persons were persuaded to invest in supposedly ultra-safe securities backed by banks and real estate. In the end, the victims of the scam were bilked of at least $20 million. Some lost their homes, many marriages were bruised, and retirements postponed.

The National White-Collar Crime Center reported in mid-l999 that almost 40 percent of the persons in a nationwide sample said that they were defrauded in some way during the previous year. Most complained of consumer rip-offs such as unnecessary auto repairs. Others of the 1,169 respondents said that they had lost money through Internet schemes, credit card fraud, and investment swindles. Victim help groups note that many people who have been cheated prefer to suffer in silence rather than to seek aid because they are embarrassed about their gullibility.

Senior citizens appear to be the most common victims of telemarketing schemes, while people in their thirties and forties, often well-educated, tend most often to fall prey to Internet swindles. A study of female victims of a telemarketing oilwell scam found that the older women were likely to blame themselves, but those who were younger tended to take a more resigned and hard-boiled attitude in shrugging off the loss (Sechrest et al.).