For years and years I watched crime rates go down

Are we counting white-collar crimes? How about state crimes? International war crimes?

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a White-Collar Criminal

Setting aside the Orange-Man-Bad angle...

The Justice Department does not conduct surveys to gather data on the prevalence of white-collar crime (as it does for other crimes), but data from both public and private institutions is consistent on this point. Late last year, for example, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that 40 million Americans had been victimized by mass-market consumer fraud in 2017, representing nearly 62 million incidents. Those figures were each more than 50 percent higher than they were six years before. The frauds span a broad spectrum. They include scams in which people are falsely told that they owe the government money (perhaps due to a supposed court case or back taxes) and the sale of fraudulent weight-loss products like dietary supplements (another surprisingly effective form of fraud that, according to the FTC’s estimate, victimized more than six million Americans).

In February, the FBI released its annual report on internet crime. It concluded that 2019 “saw both the highest number of complaints and the highest dollar losses reported” in 20 years—an average of nearly 1,300 complaints a day, with “more than $3.5 billion” in reported losses to individuals and businesses. These included losses due to phishing scams (the most frequent complaint, resulting in about 115,000 reports and nearly $60 million in losses) and so-called “business email compromise” scams, increasingly sophisticated schemes in which scammers use spoofed or hacked email accounts to fraudulently solicit money (the costliest source of complaints, resulting in about $1.8 billion in reported losses).

Days later, a working paper from the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics concluded, based on roughly two decades’ worth of data, that criminal misconduct at financial institutions has been “on the rise.” Though it was a working paper, the methodology was hard to dismiss: Using a variety of sources, the authors documented a steady increase in reports to regulators of misconduct at financial institutions—a broad array of potential wrongdoing that included suspected money laundering, various consumer frauds (like credit card, payday loan, and student loan fraud), and violations of securities laws (such as market manipulation, accounting fraud, and insider trading).

A couple of weeks after that, PricewaterhouseCoopers issued a report based on a global survey of more than 5,000 companies that concluded that “fraud and economic crime rates” are at “record highs.” The company estimated that this had resulted in $42 billion worth of losses in the last two years due to things like suspected tax fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations, bribery, and antitrust violations.

In other words, we are not just talking about Wall Street fat cats or private equity raiders unscrupulously lining their own pockets. We are talking about widespread fraud, at every level of commerce, from offers of diet pills in your email inbox to tax fraud at multinational corporations. So why isn’t the Justice Department stepping in?

I'm sure I'm not the only person here who gets near-daily scam robo-calls or duplicitous mail messages implying gifts / special deals / warning notices / outright threats that reveal themselves to be fraudulent on close inspection. Then there's the retail-investor tier crimes - the boiler room antics of Robinhood / Crypto traders. There's the embezzlement and theft occurring at the retirement and pension account level. There's price fixing and gouging occurring at the national and international level. Financial fraud is rampant in the US, and virtually uncontested when it isn't actively facilitated by public officials.