Summary:
Victims of crime are not only physical persons. Firms also experience some different forms of victimization either from outsiders or front employees. Crimes committed inside the firm are various: theft, embezzlement, fraud, fraudulent management, money laundering, vandalism etc. Assessed damage could be considerable. But in general, most of the criminological studies relating to victimization have been interested in individuals as victims. In Switzerland, to date, research on firms'victimization is simply rare and traditional research methods such as victimization survey, self-reported delinquency or controlled experiments are not very much utilized in Swiss white-collar crime studies.
Thus, in order to improve the situation, we have decided to start a victimization study on white-collar crime committed in firms of the canton of Geneva. To narrow the field of research, our project seeks to apprehend white-collar crime as a series of offences committed by employees inside the firm, by fraud or deceit, aiming at an illegitimate enrichment. The phenomenon of white-collar crime perpetrated has been evaluated by examining the presence of risk factors and prevention strategies. Furthermore, the correlation between the victimization rate and some aspects of vulnerability has also been investigated.
Using data collected from the victimization survey carried out in 2005, some of the key research questions are the following: - which are the types of offences committed?
- Which types of measure of prevention are the most efficient to prevent such offences ?
- Which type of business is more vulnerable?
- Which are the risk factors?
- Which is the profile of the authors?
- Which are the motivations?, etc.
Findings show that companies which valorize their employees and pursue a transparent management style suffer a lower victimization rate. Further, the retail sector seems to be more affected than the financial sector and big firms are more vulnerable.