'Soft' penalties drive white-collar crime

NEW DELHI: Whether it is the well-dressed man who poses as a bank employee and hoodwinks people or someone who reports a single car as stolen four times and collects insurance each time on fake documents, white collar crime is booming.
The city is crawling with increasingly inventive cheats and frauds and even cops admit that cases of cheating, fraud and forgery will only go up in the years to come.
Their reason: low risk, high gain. At least that''s the mantra, police feel, that''s driving up incidence of white collar crime. According to senior policemen, the seemingly "soft" maximum punishment (up to 7 years) that an accused faces and the availability of a "settlement" option works as a catalyst for such crimes.
The police also point out that the rising cases of loan, credit card and other bank frauds are due to the lax verification systems, especially in private banks. "If they make their cross-checking very strict they will lose business. In fact, they usually account for a certain percentage of loss through cheating and fraud from their profit targets itself," police sources said.
The phenomenon isn''t localised. According to joint commissioner of police (crime) Ranjit Narayan, the incidence of economic offences is rising nationwide. According to him, economic offences are basically "educated thefts" where the perpetrator relies on his duping skills.
"There is no particular profile or economic strata that cheats or frauds can be classified into. They come from almost all sections," Narayan said.
Recently, an all-India meeting was held, attended by top policemen from all states and the Registrar of Companies. The meeting''s agenda — ''How to deal with "vanishing" companies that leave thousands of investors affected''.