White Collar Crime
Americans pay two to ten times what other wealthy countries pay for the same drugs — not because of research costs but because the U.S. is the only wealthy country that doesn't negotiate drug prices.
White Collar Crime
Medicare and Medicaid fraud costs roughly $100 billion a year — more than all bank robbery and investment fraud combined — paid by taxpayers and the patients whose identities are used to file the claims.
White Collar Crime
Martin Shkreli raised Daraprim's price from $13.50 to $750 overnight — a legal move that cut off HIV patients from a decades-old drug — then went to prison for unrelated securities fraud.
White Collar Crime
From Ponzi's 1920 Boston scheme to LIBOR manipulation by global banks in 2012 — six cases that reveal how financial crime exploits information asymmetry and why prosecutions represent a fraction of the activity.
White Collar Crime
Major banks falsified the benchmark rate for $350 trillion in global contracts from 2003 to 2012. Total fines exceeded $9 billion. Almost no individual traders in the U.S. were convicted.
White Collar Crime
The SEC brings 50-60 insider trading cases per year while academic studies find abnormal trading before 25% of merger announcements. From Ivan Boesky to SAC Capital's $1.8 billion settlement.
White Collar Crime
Jordan Belfort's Stratton Oakmont defrauded retail investors of $200 million. He was ordered to pay $110.4 million in restitution. By 2013 when the movie came out he had paid back less than $12 million.
White Collar Crime
Michael Milken earned $500 million in 1987 running an insider trading network through Drexel Burnham Lambert. He paid $600 million in fines served 22 months and received a presidential pardon in 2020.
White Collar Crime
Bernie Madoff defrauded 37,000 investors across 136 countries of $64.8 billion in fictitious balances. The SEC received credible warnings in 2005 and 2007 and investigated both times without finding the fraud.
White Collar Crime
In 1920 Charles Ponzi collected $15 million from 40,000 Boston investors promising 50% returns in 45 days on a postal arbitrage that couldn't work at any real scale. He had $200 left when it collapsed.
White Collar Crime
Enron WorldCom Theranos FTX WeWork — five companies across four decades that all followed the same structure: a real business hits a wall and leadership chooses the lie over the correction.
White Collar Crime
Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $8.9 billion in FTX customer deposits to his own trading firm. When customers tried to withdraw it in November 2022 the exchange collapsed in ten days. He got 25 years.