Writer
Matt Zbrog
Follow the Money
Some of the world’s most malignant criminals never pulled a trigger or detonated an explosive, but they have ruined countless lives. By the most conservative estimates, white-collar crime costs the U.S. $300 billion per year—more than four times the annual budget of the Department of Education. However, in 2017, the prosecution of white-collar crime was at a 20-year low. So why do crimes such as insider trading, embezzlement, predatory lending, Ponzi schemes, and threat financing often go unpunished?
Armed with elite legal teams and well-heeled lobbyists, many white-collar criminals seem untouchable or “too big to jail.” But are they really? The Follow the Money series explores various types of financial crimes and interviews experts in the field on how to bring these robber barons to justice.
Follow the Money: How Rich Criminals Get Treated Differently
January 22, 2020
The criminal justice system has systemic flaws that disproportionately punish the poor and reward the rich. A bevy of factors play into this disparity, but mainly manifest themselves in discrepancies in bail, discrepancies in sentencing, and discrepancies in incarceration.
Follow the Money: Healthcare Fraud
December 12, 2019
In a hypothetical Dante’s Inferno scenario where all of the world’s white collar criminals were arranged in a descending order of wickedness, healthcare fraudsters would sit somewhere between hell’s eighth and ninth concentric rings.
Follow the Money: Tax Evasion
December 4, 2019
There’s no algorithm for justice, and thus there’s still a strong need for investigators to perform their due diligence and apply many of the same tactics used to bring down Al Capone: comparing records, subpoenaing documents, interviewing possible witnesses, and following the money.
Follow the Money: Identity Theft
September 13, 2019
Identity theft doesn’t have a typical crime scene: there is no blood, and there are no fingerprints, but there are still forensic traces if an investigator knows where to look.
Follow the Money: Ponzi Schemes
August 26, 2019
Everything in a Ponzi scheme is designed to take advantage of the blinding aspect of greed and divert attention away from the details. But the details are exactly where forensic investigators are trained to look.
Follow the Money: Cybercrime
July 12, 2019
In the past, the mantra of many white-collar crime investigators was to follow the money, and that mantra still holds true, but in this new world of cybercrime, today’s forensic professionals understand that it’s often more important, and more effective, to follow the data.
Follow the Money: Insider Trading
May 8, 2019
If two corporate executives know that their company is about to be acquired—but the public does not know yet—those executives would be guilty of insider trading if they made trades based on their private knowledge.
What is Threat Financing? A Conversation with a Professor
January 23, 2019
Threat financing is the most violent form of financial crime, defined as the funding of groups or individuals who pose a threat to domestic, international, and regional security; the term is still new, and has nuanced and evolving applications.
Matt Zbrog is a writer and researcher from Southern California. Since 2018, he’s written extensively about the increasing digitization of investigations, the growing importance of forensic science, and emerging areas of investigative practice like open source intelligence (OSINT) and blockchain forensics. His writing and research are focused on learning from those who know the subject best, including leaders and subject matter specialists from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and the American Academy of Forensic Science (AAFS). As part of the Big Employers in Forensics series, Matt has conducted detailed interviews with forensic experts at the ATF, DEA, FBI, and NCIS.
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