International White-Collar Crime Essay
The requirement for global networks is more characteristic of intellectual property violations, money laundering, drugs, espionage, art theft, and white slavery. These crimes always involve cooperating syndicates and international networks in both the countries of origin and destination chiefly because the desired commodity must be transported from a region of surplus to one of scarcity.
On reflection, therefore, it is the persistence of human greed and avarice that underlies all white-collar crime.
Technology has merely changed the speed, security, and medium of communication. Globalization and the harmonization of the European Community, two logical outcomes of the belief in free markets and value theory Adam Smith espoused inThe Wealth of Nations, has also eased of movement of humans, goods, and money across borders.
By themselves, networks are neither new nor special. Informal and transient networks arise and persist both domestically and across national borders in response to common interests, ideologies, or economic self-interest. Recall how an underground railroad of sympathetic Americans, North, and South, to where they could enjoy freeman status. Or the Poles, Dutch, and Frenchmen who hid Jews from the Gestapo during . By sheer necessity, counterpart networks had to be , in Italy, Switzerland, Spain, etc. through which Jews needed to pass on the way to freedom.
The great advances made by even the developing countries in modernizing their telecommunications networks means that even the of the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia have become transit points for money-laundering generally and the type associated with illegal drugs in particular. In this case, networks of conspirators and conduit banks are needed to circumvent banking and money-laundering laws in either the producing- or consuming nation.
At the same time, the broadening of telephone infrastructure and Internet penetration has to perpetrate wire fraud by the relatively simple expedient of bulk email.
