Angie Tsai, Gus Nosti, Matthew Hanks: NSW’s white collar criminals revealed

Everyone has a picture in their head of what a criminal looks like.
But every now and then a crook comes along and doesn’t quite fit the bill. They wear a suit, they are successful, motivated and often hardworking.
These crooks who deal in crimes such as bribery, fraud or money laundering are often referred to as ‘white collar criminals’.
University of Sydney Business School fraud and corporate governance academic director Professor Clinton Free said white-collar crime referred to nonviolent crimes such as bribery, insider trading and money laundering, with the most common offence being fraud.
Mr Free said academics refer to the ‘fraud triangle’, which is a situation when a person requires an opportunity, a motivation and a rationalisation to commit fraud.
“The motives for white collar crime are typically framed around need and greed,” he said.
“I have interviewed hundreds of offenders in prison to try and better understand rationalisation, the moral justification that offenders provide in accounts of their offending and I think these ultimately fall into two buckets.
“The first is about diminishing the impact of their offending. This involves claims the victim did not actually suffer any substantial harm. This might even include characterising the crime as a temporary loan.
“The second is diminishing their agency by pointing to others. These rationalisations position the offender as a victim of others – who provoke, pressure or even compel the offender to act. Others who demand it, others who also do it, or others who deserve it.”
Professor Tony Ciro from Australian Catholic University’s Thomas More Law School said white collar crime was often closely linked with conventional crime.
“There is often a blur between white collar crime and conventional crime and the two often overlap because criminal conduct can go into the financial side quickly,” he said.
“A lot of white collar crime in Australia is perpetuated by organised criminal gangs that have conventional criminal activity and then need to engage in white collar crime to make teir criminality look more respectable.”
Mr Ciro also said poor working conditions and, in some circumstances the allure of performance bonuses, can contribute to professional workers turning to white collar crime.
“There is evidence that sometimes organisations with a poor work culture can lead individuals to the type of activity that can potentially borderline criminal,” he said.
“So if something is incentivised, such as ‘you will end up with a bigger bonus if you make more profit for an organisation’, that then can lead itself to activity which can be criminal.”

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