Follow the Harm White-Collar Crime · Crime Lab 2 · Midwestern State University
There is no national count of white-collar crime. There are a handful of general counting systems, plus a separate set of enforcement records at every regulatory agency with a statute to enforce, and none of them is required to talk to the others. Simpson (2013) calls this the data problem, and it is the reason every prevalence claim about white-collar crime has to be read with the question: counted where, by whom, and after what? This lab gives you a map of the systems, then asks you to take one harm and follow it through every system that could record it. You will find that each system has a gate, that most gates are decisions made by someone other than the victim, and that a harm can be real, large, and unlawful and still appear nowhere. Work in pairs, but each of you submits your own response sheet at the end of class.
Eight kinds of places a white-collar harm could be counted
Each entry below names a kind of system, what it counts, who decides whether an event enters it, and what it cannot see. Seven of them are single systems. The sixth, a regulator's enforcement records, stands for dozens: every federal and state regulator keeps its own enforcement records, in its own format, under its own statute, and no two of them combine. Read all eight before you trace anything. The middle line of each entry, the gate, is the one that matters most.
Quick check. Which of these systems can record a victimization without anyone reporting it to an authority?
Only the survey. The National Crime Victimization Survey, its Identity Theft Supplement, and one-off surveys like the 2010 National Public Survey on White Collar Crime ask a sample of people what happened to them, whether or not they ever told anyone. Every other system on this page waits for someone to act: a victim to file, an investigator to open a case, a prosecutor to charge, an agency to assess a penalty. That is why survey counts of white-collar victimization are always much larger than the counts in any official system, and why the core NCVS, which does not ask about fraud at all, leaves the largest category of white-collar victimization unmeasured most years.
Sources for this tab: FBI, Crime in the Nation and NIBRS offense definitions (Group A offense codes 26A through 26G, 270, 510, 250, 09B); Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCVS methodology and the Identity Theft Supplement; FTC, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 and 2025 testimony; FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report; TRAC, Federal Prosecution of White-Collar Crimes Receiving Less and Less Attention (May 23, 2025); Good Jobs First, Violation Tracker documentation; agency enforcement database documentation (HHS-OIG, DOL WHD, EPA ECHO, SEC, CFPB). Retrieved September 2026.
Pick one harm and follow it
Six harms are below. Each is a composite drawn from real enforcement cases of the kind you sorted in Lab 1. Choose one. Then, for each of the eight kinds of system, decide whether the harm could be recorded there at all. For the regulator's enforcement records, think of the specific agency that has jurisdiction over your harm. When you have made all eight calls, the reference answers appear, each with the gate the harm would have to pass. Trace a second harm if there is time; the response sheet asks about one.
What this means for a prevalence claim. To count this harm nationally, you would have to query every system that could hold it, know that each one records a different unit (a complaint, an offense, a case, a penalty), know that the same event can appear in three of them and be counted three times or in none of them and be counted zero times, and still have no way to see the events that never passed any gate. Simpson (2013) describes the field as living with this. And the count of eight understates it: the regulator's enforcement records on this page stand for dozens of separate agency systems, so a harm that touches two statutes can sit in two regulators' records that never meet. The lab's point is that you now know exactly where the missing cases go.
Same harm, different counts
When two systems count the same kind of harm, the numbers do not agree, and the gap is not an error. It is the gates. Guess before each reveal.
Identity theft in one year
The Bureau of Justice Statistics asked a national sample of people age 16 and over whether anyone had misused their personal information in the past 12 months. About 23.9 million people said yes, roughly one in ten, with $16.4 billion in losses. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network counts the identity theft reports people file with the FTC.
For every 100 people the survey says experienced identity theft, how many identity theft reports did the FTC receive in a comparable year?
About 5 reports per 100 victims. Two thirds of victims called their bank or card company. Seven percent told the police. A smaller share filed with the FTC. The bank is not a counting system anyone publishes, so the largest single destination for identity theft reports is a place the public numbers never see. The gate here is the victim's own judgment about who can fix the problem, and the answer is rarely a government agency.
Sources: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Victims of Identity Theft, 2021 (NCJ 306474, October 2023): 23.9 million persons age 16 or older, 9 percent of the population, $16.4 billion in total losses, about 7 percent reported to law enforcement, 67 percent contacted a credit card company or bank. FTC, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024: 1.1 million identity theft reports, 18 percent of 6.47 million total reports. The years differ by three; the ratio is an order-of-magnitude comparison, not a precise rate.
Fraud, from the victim to the courtroom
Four systems count fraud, and each counts a different thing. Guess the last one before you look.
In fiscal year 2024, how many white-collar crime prosecutions did federal prosecutors file nationwide, across every U.S. Attorney's office and every white-collar statute?
4,332. The bars are on different scales and count different units, which is the lesson. The survey counts households. The FTC counts reports, and 62 percent of its fraud reports involve no money lost. IC3 counts complaints. TRAC counts cases a federal prosecutor chose to file, and that number fell from 10,909 in fiscal 1995 to 4,332 in fiscal 2024, with fiscal 2025 projected at 3,862, the lowest on record. Every step from the top bar to the bottom bar is a gate, and the last gate, the prosecutor's decision, is the one that changes most with politics.
Sources: NW3C, The 2010 National Public Survey on White Collar Crime (24 percent of households victimized in the prior 12 months, p. 8). FTC testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, March 25, 2026 (about 3 million fraud reports and $15.9 billion in reported losses for 2025, up from 2.6 million and more than $12 billion in 2024). FBI IC3, 2025 Internet Crime Report (1,008,597 complaints, $20.9 billion in losses). TRAC, Federal Prosecution of White-Collar Crimes Receiving Less and Less Attention, May 23, 2025 (FY 2024: 4,332; FY 1995: 10,909; FY 2025 projection: 3,862). Bar lengths are illustrative; the units are not comparable.
Wage theft: estimated versus recovered
In Lab 1 you met the Economic Policy Institute's estimate that minimum wage violations alone take more than $15 billion a year from workers. The Wage and Hour Division is the federal agency that recovers it.
In fiscal year 2025, how much in back wages did the Wage and Hour Division recover for workers, across all violations, nationwide?
Less than two cents on the dollar, and that is a good year. The estimate and the recovery are not measuring the same thing. The estimate is a survey-based projection of what workers were owed. The recovery is what one agency with 611 investigators got back through the cases it could open. The gate is capacity. Recovered wages are the number that appears in Violation Tracker and in agency reports, so when someone says wage theft is a small problem because the recoveries are small, they are reading the gate as if it were the harm.
Sources: Economic Policy Institute, Employers Steal Billions from Workers' Paychecks Each Year (2017). U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division news release, January 8, 2026 (more than $259 million in back wages for nearly 177,000 workers in FY 2025). Workplace Justice Lab, Rutgers University and Northwestern University, May 2025 (611 investigators, one per 278,000 workers).
Environmental crime: how many defendants?
EPA's criminal enforcement program covers every federal environmental statute for the whole country. In fiscal year 2025, how many defendants did it charge?
156, and EPA calls that a strong year. The agency's own language is that criminal enforcement is reserved for the most egregious and intentional violations. Everything else is a civil penalty, a consent decree, or a notice of violation, and those live in ECHO, the database you will use in Lab 9. A student who searched federal criminal dockets for environmental crime would conclude it barely exists. A student who searched ECHO would find hundreds of thousands of facilities with a violation history. Both would be reading the system, not the harm.
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Annual Results for FY 2025: Criminal Enforcement (187 cases opened, 156 defendants charged, 65 years of incarceration, over $600 million in fines, restitution, and court-ordered relief, and over $1 billion in forfeitures).
What the public reports, and what it knows
The one system that does not wait for a gate is the survey. The 2010 National Public Survey on White Collar Crime, your Meeting B reading, asked a national sample of households what had happened to them. Michel, Cochran, and Heide (2016), your Meeting A reading, asked what people know.
Of the white-collar victimizations that households reported in the 2010 survey, what share reached a crime control agency of any kind (police, a prosecutor, a regulator)?
About 12 in 100. Nearly half of victimizations were never reported to anyone. Of the ones that were, the most common destination was a credit card company, which publishes nothing. Fewer than one in eight victimizations reached any agency that could count it as crime. The three most common victimizations in the survey were credit card fraud, price misrepresentation, and unnecessary repairs, which are also three harms that no police department records as a rule.
What people know. Michel, Cochran, and Heide built the first validated scale of public knowledge about white-collar crime and gave it to 408 respondents. Knowledge was low. Respondents held what the authors call myths about the frequency, the cost, and the physical harm of white-collar crime relative to street crime. Put the two studies together. The public experiences white-collar victimization at a rate of roughly one household in four each year, reports almost none of it to the state, and then, asked in the abstract, underestimates how much of it there is. The counting systems and the public's beliefs reinforce each other.
Sources: Huff, R., Desilets, C., and Kane, J. (2010). The 2010 National Public Survey on White Collar Crime. National White Collar Crime Center (24 percent of households and 17 percent of individuals victimized in the prior 12 months; 54.7 percent of household victimizations reported to any entity; 11.7 percent reached a crime control agency; credit card companies 30.9 percent and police 18.8 percent of reports; pp. 8, 14 to 16). Michel, C., Cochran, J. K., and Heide, K. M. (2016). Public knowledge about white-collar crime: An exploratory study. Crime, Law and Social Change, 65(1-2), 67-91.
Lab 2 response sheet
Answer the four questions below in complete sentences. Then use the button at the bottom to assemble your answers and your trace into one block of text, and paste that text into the Lab 2 submission in D2L before you leave class. Your answers stay on this page and are not sent anywhere until you paste them.