We’re in the Midst of a White-Collar Crime Wave

Everywhere you look in America, crime is out of control. Whether it’s Elon Musk—the world’s richest man—cutting regulatory corners in public, professional son-in-law Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis, hackers draining hundreds of millions of dollars out of a crypto game, or the meatpacking industry boosting profits through price gouging, the economy’s winners color outside the lines with increasing chutzpah. There’s a lot of evidence that the country is in the middle of an alarming white-collar crime wave, but, unlike street crime, the phenomenon doesn’t show up much in our political discourse. It’s time to change that.

Though most elected officials aren’t treating white-collar malfeasance as a matter of urgent public concern, the public seems to be experiencing it as one. Excitement around crypto currency has spurred the growth of a whole new fraud category, propelling investment scam losses to a record high, including over $50 million reported lost to crypto scams in Q1 of 2021. But you can’t blame tech: Phone scams took just under $30 billion off Americans in the pandemic’s first year, a 400 percent increase since 2015 and by far the highest ever estimated. (Though the voice on the phone is probably just some schmuck overseas, rogue Internet Service Providers and marketing database companies in the US are cashing in on their work.) People are getting taken at work, too: In a survey of service workers, 34 percent reported an increase in wage theft by their employers during the pandemic. A commentator could pull up these figures all day, and so could a prosecutor.

Perhaps the thieves feel safe because the number of corporate and white-collar prosecutions has been on a declining trend for 10 or 20 years now, depending on how you measure. At the beginning of the pandemic, federal enforcers told reporters to expect a flood of cases at the end of 2020, but the year closed with cases at their lowest recorded levels. The Biden administration got to work and managed to make 2021’s numbers the second-lowest ever. That’s no surprise when you remember most of the enforcement drop happened under Biden’s boss Barack Obama, not Donald Trump or George W. Bush. Taking it easy on financial crime has bipartisan consensus, and a shocking number of people are paying the price. A Harris poll suggests almost 60 million Americans lost money to phone scams between March 2020 and 2021, making you roughly 1,786 times more likely to be robbed with a phone than with a gun.