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Examples Of White Collar Crime

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White collar crime is a form of deviance where one has to be in a certain position usually in a corporation or company where they can commit a crime. Corporate crime is when the entire company is involved in criminal acts. The two categories of crimes have distinct differences in that white collar crime is an act/acts that benefit an individual, corporate crime usually benefits the company or corporation.
An example of white collar crime would be the case of Marcus Schrenker. Schrenker owned three financial companies and was an investment advisor and managed peoples pension funds worth millions of dollars. Marcus performed unlawful investment practices and let his license expire, his home was raided by the Securities Division while he was …show more content…
Hooker Chemical Company would dump their toxic waste into the canal, it is said to have contained “21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve that are known carcinogens” (“Love Canal”). The company ended up selling the land to a developer without specifically disclosing what they did, the developer built houses on the land and the residents began to get very sick due to the leaching of chemicals above the filled land. This whole situation ended up costing millions and eventually the corporation’s predecessor, Occidental had to pay back over $100 million to the EPA Superfund and $27 million to the United States on behalf of FEMA.

These two examples of crime show how White collar and corporate crimes are different, where Schrenker acted alone in his schemes and Hooker Chemical committed crimes as a company whole, many players were involved in these negligent acts. The overlap of these two examples I believe could be shown in how Marcus was able to get these elite clients, if he was not a successful player in the company he would not have had access to the clients, as Sutherland stated in our text, a person of respectability and high social status is needed to commit a white collar crime (Goode, pg.

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