Summary
"To be sure, there is much research that focuses on crimes as events rather than on the criminals who cause those events. But mostly, research has been devoted to studying the social conditions that facilitate the commission of offences. It has paid much less attention to understanding the methodology by which and institutional context through which particular actions take place. The resulting deficiencies are particularly marked with respect to profit-driven offences. The type of information collected by police or prosecutors for the purposes of a particular criminal proceeding may be quite different from the type of information necessary in understanding the nature of on-going criminal markets or the modus operandi of the underworld economy as a whole. Nor is academic criminology much more helpful – generally speaking, crimes are used to define categories of offenders rather than being a subject of (more technocratic) interest in and of themselves.
The question then becomes, is there an alternative system of analysis that can help to fill in
shortcomings of more traditional methods of classifying offences?
But here the objective is more modest: it is to disaggregate the concept of profit-driven “crime” by examining a possible typology that is functional, rather than sectoral, that is process- rather than offender-based, and that is applicable to all offences where profit is at least partially the motive."--Pages 1, 2.
Contents
1. Introduction -- 2. The typology -- Table 1. The schema in brief -- Table 2. Predatory crimes -- Table 3. Market based crimes -- Table 4. Commercial crimes -- Table 5. Main mechanism -- Table 6. Nature of transfer -- Table 7. Institutional context -- Table 8. Means of payment / transfer of value -- 3. Detailed analysis of selected cases -- 3.1. Payment card fraud -- 3.2. Bank fraud -- 3.3. Counterfeit currency -- Table 9: seizure statistics Canadian fake currency -- 3.4. Loan-sharking -- 3.5. CFC smuggling -- 3.6. Trafficking in bear gall bladders -- 3.7. Fraudulent bankruptcy -- 3.8. Telemarketing scams -- 3.9. “Midnight dumping” -- 4. Implications for the criminal justice system -- Appendix 1. The sweatshop and its criminal milieu -- Appendix II. The curious case of insider trading -- Appendix III. The loan-sharking scene in Montreal today -- Appendix IV. Popular “telemarketing” frauds.