White Collar Crimes - What You Need to Know

White collar crime is a broad legal term that encompasses various types of criminal offenses that are non-violent in nature, and usually involve fraud and illegal business or financial transactions. Bank fraud, credit card fraud, social security fraud, identity theft, money laundering, counterfeiting, insider trading, identity theft and forgery are examples of white collar crimes. These crimes are prosecuted seriously by federal and state attorneys.

By way of background, Edwin Sutherland, a notable sociologist, first coined the term, "white collar crime" in 1939 when he argued that there must be significant differences between crimes like burglary, robbery and murder, which he categorized as blue collar crimes and the ones he categorized as white collar ones, such as fraud. Sutherland went further saying that white collar crimes are more injurious to the society than their blue collar counterparts, and that white collar offenders are treated with more lenience.

The legal term was originally intended to categorize offenders, but it has been used since then to include a wide range of nonviolent offenses. Today the Department of Justice defines white collar crime as "offenses of non violent illegal activities which primarily entail traditional ideas of deception, manipulation, deceit, subterfuge and breach of trust."

One of the most common types of crimes committed by white collar workers is embezzlement. This type of offense takes place when a person dishonestly handles money that is entrusted to his or her care. For instance, when an employee takes money from a corporate account, and spends the money for his or her personal gain.

Another type that is often associated with this form of crime is fraud. The most common types of fraud today include internet fraud, credit card fraud, commercial fraud, phone or telemarketing fraud, mail fraud, insurance fraud and healthcare fraud.

If you are notified that you are under investigation of a white collar crime, it is wise if that you hire an attorney right away. Remember that you are not obligated to speak with law enforcement officers at all about the alleged offense and it is wise that you do not do so before consulting with a criminal defense attorney. All too often those under investigation for white collar crimes mistakenly believe they can talk their way out of an arrest.

Just bear the things I discussed in this article about this particular type of crime so that you won't commit another mistake when you are charged with it.

Disclaimer: Any information contained in this article should not be construed as legal advice.

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The Best Way to Keep Your Children From the Threat of Cyber Crime

In this article, you will learn the best way to keep your children from the threat of cyber crime. You'll also discover about protecting your children from cyber crime. The internet can be regarded as a two sided blade. It can be used for positive things, but on the other side, the internet could cause users to get caught by cyber crime. Crime on the internet is increasingly dangerous if it threatens the children. Because they are still too young to monitor suspicious things around them. So it is your duty as a parent to always keep an eye on the children. Let's begin by discussing what you should do to keep children from the threat of cyber crime.

How to Keep Children From The Threat Of Cyber Crime:

* Encourage children and their friends to look after each other - this way will drastically reduce the possibility that they were used as targets.

* Put the family computer with internet connection and toys in the middle of the house to facilitate the supervision of children online activities.

* Ask children what they were doing when you are online, and try to get a detailed answer. Ask them to give 'tour online' on the sites they visit frequently, and other online activities in which they participate.

* Make in-depth discussion about cyber crime with older children, who may access the internet at different places, including outside the home, where they are not always supervised.

* Make sure children feel comfortable reporting crimes they experience to you, promise you will report any incidents, if they want - and do it. For example, the parents approached the crime perpetrators, teachers, or any other person who has the potential to make things worse. Think about the best strategy to train your child.

* Give a clear picture of the children, about the things they will face when the crime's involvement in the virtual world with other people.

To prevent your children from becoming a victim of cyber crime keep in mind these 5 basic tips, be vigilant and conscious of the information you and your children share through the intranet connection.

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Breaking the Crime Triangle

When hearing the words, Crime Triangle, what comes to your mind? Yakuza? Russian Mafia? Italian Mafia? Chicago Mafia? LA Street Gangs? Bermuda Triangle? Cape Fear? All of these groups and areas tend to conjure up images of violent criminals and sustainable crime.

However, the crime triangle is something much more benign. It is an understanding and awareness of how crime happens. By understanding the process, you, as an individual, can significantly decrease your chances of becoming a potential victim.

Contrary to popular belief, the boogeyman doesn't just jump out of the bushes to attack you. Crime is a process and often follows a pattern.

Let's take a journey back to middle school and fire awareness training. We were all trained that fire cannot happen unless three things are present: an ignition source, fuel and oxygen. If you remove any one of these components, you remove the threat of fire. This was known as the Fire Triangle.

The same thing applies to crime. Three elements must be present in order for crime to be successful: desire, target and opportunity. These comprise the Crime Triangle. Fortunately, you have control of two out of the three elements. Let's take a look at each of the individual elements.

The first element is desire. That is the criminal's drive and motivation. There is nothing you can realistically do to curtail or eliminate that desire. Once he has the desire, he is looking for a target and an opportunity. This is where you come in.

Can you guess who the potential target may be? A target is anyone who appears to be an easy victim. A target appears not to be aware of their surroundings and appears easy to overtake or overpower. An easy target, by definition, will not put up any resistance.

So what can you do? You can "harden" the target by becoming more aware of your surroundings. By being aware of your body language: eyes up, shoulders back, arms swinging, walking confidently and scanning the area; you send a signal to any would be predator that you are not easy prey. By taking a self defense course, you further harden the target by gaining the skill set to fight back if you are confronted.

The next element is opportunity. You control this by paying attention to your environment. Are you in a bad area of town? Are you walking in an unlit area? Are you in a secluded area? Are you letting strangers in too close to ask questions - not defining personal boundaries? Limiting opportunities is about being aware of your environment and your intuition to remove yourself from a questionable environment once you sense danger.

We can take control of our own personal safety by understanding how crime happens and by educating ourselves to become tougher targets. In doing so, we begin breaking the Crime Triangle.

Angie M. Tarighi is the CEO of Women's Self-Defense Institute, a national leader in educating and training women about their self-defense and personal security options.

An Explanation of Hate Crimes

Crimes of this nature are defined as criminal acts against an individual or a group of people because of their perceived race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sexual orientation, gender or disability. People cannot help who they are or where they were born; hate crimes target individuals for who they are, what group they are a member of, or the color of their skin.

Although freedom of speech is protected under the United States Constitution and is not a crime of hate in itself, speech that carries a credible threat of violence against a person or a group named above is considered criminal in California.

According Hate Crime Statistics for 2010 released by the FBI, of the 6,624 hate crime incidents, 47.3% were racially motivated, while 20% were religiously motivated, 19.3% related to sexual orientation and 12.8% involved ethnicity and nation of origin bias.

What types of behaviors are categorized as a crime? For example, using force or threats of force to induce bodily injury, intimidate or interrupt another person from exercising their constitutional rights would be a hate crime.

Another example would be damaging another person's property in order to intimidate or interfere with their ability to exercise their constitutional rights. A good example of this would be burning a cross on a Buddhist church's property or painting a swastika on a Jewish temple. Desecrating a religious symbol or displaying a threatening sign on someone else's property with the intent to terrorize them is also a hate crime in California, along with the rest of the country.

Any kind of activity that vandalizes a church, synagogue, mosque or other house of worship with the intent to terrorize its parishioners is a hate crime.

The state of California separates hate crimes into misdemeanors or felonies depending on the facts surrounding the case. For instance, disorderly conduct at a place of worship where people are assembled is prosecuted as a misdemeanor, whereas vandalizing a house of worship based on religious bias can be prosecuted as a felony.

When a victim was intentionally killed because of their race, color, religion, nationality, or country of origin, then the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole might be imposed. Furthermore, the suspect may be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole if the victim was killed because of their sexual orientation, gender or disability. When the criminal offense was not committed because of a bias, the person can still nonetheless be criminally prosecuted for any of the above crimes.

If you are facing hate crime charges, you will need to speak with an experienced criminal defense attorney who can further explain hate crimes and their corresponding penalties. Since you could be facing anywhere from light penalties in a misdemeanor charge to far more serious penalties if you are convicted of a felony, proper legal representation is essential. Without a criminal lawyer, you are essentially putting your entire future in jeopardy. It is important that you protect your legal rights, your freedom, and your future by contacting a criminal defense lawyer in your area right as soon as possible.

Martinian & Associates is an experienced criminal defense firm conveniently located in Los Angeles, California. Their legal team has succeeded in exonerating clients and getting their charges reduced a number of times over. They would like to help you with your charges by utilizing their negotiation and litigation skills to achieve a better outcome in the case against you. You cannot give up hope when you are under investigation or arrest, there's no telling what the right attorney can do to improve your situation. Don't hesitate to contact a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney from their firm at (888) 847-9821 today.

Do Campus Crime Statistics Make You Safer?

Since the early-1990s the Federal government, through the US Department of Education, requires more than 6000 colleges and universities to publish an annual report disclosing their campus security policies and three years of selected crime statistics related to that college or university.

US Department of Education collects this data and makes it available on web sites and in published reports. You can see the data for any particular institution that is required to report. You can sort the data by the size of institutional enrollment, or you can check institutions by states, or by the type of instructional programs they offer.

This is an impressive collection of data but it begs the question of whether or not it actually means anything. It's difficult or impossible to prove a negative but you have to wonder if the millions of man-hours that have been spent in collecting, compiling, and reporting this data has made one college student, anywhere, safer.

Crimes occur in big cities, small cities, and towns and villages everywhere across the globe. It should not surprise anybody to learn then that crimes also occur on college campuses in big cities, small cities, and towns and villages across the globe. As you might expect the statistics reveal that the campuses with the highest crime rates are located in big cities adjacent to areas with the highest crime rates. A small size art oriented college located in Boston always ends up near the top of the "Crimes on Campus" list. A little investigation reveals, however, that the majority of those reported crimes occur in and around a notorious subway station in a high crime area immediately adjacent to campus.

Other writers who have commented on the effectiveness of this data for keeping students safe have pointed out that some schools, particularly some located in major metropolitan areas, have been fined one or more times by the US Department of Education for failing to accurately report on campus crime. The bottom line is that if you are concerned about safety on campus, either for a school which you are thinking of attending, or a school that you currently attend, forget the statistics, do your own investigation, and use your own common sense.

Alcohol and violence go hand-in-hand on college campuses. The Harvard School of Public Health reports that 77% of students who hang around regularly with a binge drinker will either be a victim of or the perpetrator of an assault or a DUI. The old birds of a feather maxim still applies.

Keep your dorm room or your apartment door locked when you are out and when you are inside. Next to bicycle theft burglary seems to be the most common campus crime.

The same rules that apply to urban streets apply to urban college campuses and also to the pastoral rural college campuses. Walk in lighted areas and in a group whenever and wherever you can. Always be aware of your surroundings.

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The Basic Correlation Between Gender and Crime

The relationship between gender and crime are intense, persistent, and contradictory. Both women and men commit and are victims of crimes, but their perspectives, understandings, and interpretations of the crime are likely to be different. As far as observation has been made, it has been proven that both men and women differ in their crime rates, patterns, and in their experiences of discrimination. Also, women are statistically less likely to commit crime than men.

Crime is more easily identifiable as a male characteristic in this society rather than female characteristic because of historical social conventions. Men have been generally the people who go out for work, have drinking habits. Generally, men used to socialize more than women in the past which created an opportunity for men to experience varied and traumatic types of strains. These strains led men to indulge in crime.

On the other hand, women have a more practical and sensible approach to any criminal activity; this is because they are more careful in exposing themselves to persuasion for crimes such as theft, fraud and so on. Another reason is that the females are expected to exhibit soft characteristics, tend to look beautiful, and are considered as the connecting link in the social circle.

Women who are aggressive or violent are more prone to be negatively labeled in the society. The major exclusion to this gender pattern is for prostitution. It is a well established fact that females have lower arrest rates when compared to men except for prostitution.

Both female criminals as well as male criminals, tend to come from surroundings marked by poverty, discrimination, poor schooling and so on as a common factor. But distinctively, male performers may be more self-centered in their approach to crimes and committing offences which directly benefit them or gives them an instantaneous sense of gain. Women who commit crime tend to have a history of being exposed to physical torture or pain, psychologically trauma or sexually abuse either in their childhood or in their adult life.

There are many things such as biology, psychology, economic, education and society which will have a major impact on each and every individual's activities and their understanding of what is acceptable. So, it is a must to look at the issue of correlation between gender and crime from a variety of angles.

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Notable Crime Books of 2011

FAVORITE BOOK

The final exit of a beloved sleuth is the focal point of my choice: THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). Henning Mankell makes it clear that his brilliant if chronically depressed Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, has solved his last case. In the course of investigating a political conspiracy that dates back to the cold war, Wallander comes to realize “how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in” and how inadequate his efforts to fix that broken world have proved. Although it accounts for his perpetual mood of despair, that insight also makes him a hero for this age of anxiety.

FAVORITE NEW SLEUTH

George Pelecanos’s new protagonist, Spero Lucas, is not only younger and friskier than most private eyes, he’s also untainted by the cynicism that goes with the profession. Making his first appearance in THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), Lucas brings his lusty appetites and taste for danger to a vivid narrative about gang wars in Washington, D.C. The big question: Can Pelecanos keep his young hero from flaming out?

FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL / FAVORITE ACTION THRILLER

Sebastian Rotella scores twice for TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which begins on the San Diego-Tijuana border and sends good guys from both sides of the fence to combat drug smugglers and terrorists in the badlands of South America.

FAVORITE COZY

That would beA TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99), Louise Penny’s mystery starring Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and set in the enchanting village of Three Pines.

FAVORITE REGIONAL MYSTERY

In SHOCK WAVE (Putnam, $27.95), John Sandford drags Virgil Flowers away from an all-girls volleyball tournament and dispatches him to Butternut Falls, where a bomber is intent on keeping out a big-box store.

FAVORITE SUSPENSE NOVEL

Cara Hoffman takes on rural poverty, domestic abuse and teenage violence in her first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), which watches a family of urbanites come to grief in upstate New York. Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit.

FAVORITE MYSTERY WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

A tie between the End of the WASP SEASON (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), by Denise Mina, and THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE (Soho, $24), by the Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Mina’s gritty Glasgow procedural features a female cop who takes pity on a 15-year-old killer because she’s witnessed the neglect that can produce such damaged children. The criminal mistreatment of children is also the focus of the Danish thriller, which follows the efforts of a nurse to identify the 3-year-old boy she rescues at the Copenhagen train station.

FAVORITE NOIR

Antiheroes don’t get much darker than the protagonist of James Sallis’s moody existential mystery,THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who wants to make one last clean kill before he dies. But I have to go with the rogue Scott Phillips introduces in THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25). This prince of a fellow made a killing pimping and working the black market as an Army quartermaster in Rome during World War II. But peacetime life in Wichita is so dull it takes all his ingenuity to come up with a new way to make a dishonest living.

FAVORITE SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY

Michael Koryta easily takes top honors for two eerie novels, THE CYPRESS HOUSE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a 1930s gangster story with spooky undertones, and THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99) , a ghost story set in an old mining region of Kentucky.

FAVORITE HISTORICAL MYSTERY

If the category were narrowed to World War II-era novels, it would be a tossup between FIELD GRAY (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the darkest of Philip Kerr’s Berlin stories, and David Downing’s POTSDAM STATION (Soho, $25), with its horrific scenes of Berlin falling to the Red Army. But in an open field, top honors go to C. J. Sansom for HEARTSTONE (Viking, $27.95), a Tudor mystery that captures the chaotic state of England in the aftermath of Henry VIII’s ill-conceived invasion of France.

FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY AN OLD PRO

That’s a tough one in a year that saw top-drawer work from Michael Connelly in THE FIFTH WITNESS (Little, Brown, $27.99), James Lee Burke in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) and Thomas Perry in THE INFORMANT (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). Sue Grafton earns special mention for keeping Kinsey Millhone engaged and endearing through her 22nd alphabet mystery, V IS FOR VENGEANCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95). But for sentimental reasons, I’m going with Lawrence Block’s nostalgic novel, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $25.99), set in New York in the 1970s, when Matt Scudder was still a working cop and crime was still “the leading occupation” in his Hell’s Kitchen ­neighborhood.

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