Business Scandals

This page contains links to important sources of information on financial scandals, corruption and fraud, miscellaneous articles on this topic, organisations providing advice and useful sources for further research.

General Sources on Corruption or Alleged Financial Wrong-Doing

Corporate Narc

The mission of CorporateNarc.Com is to educate the public in consumer affairs, to provide consumers with up-to-date business information and expose business fraud and corruption, as well as unfair and deceptive business practices.

 

Crimes of Persuasion

In depth explanations of various white collar crimes such as prime bank fraud, pyramid scams, internet fraud, phone scams, counterfeiting of financial instruments, chain letters, modelling agency and "Nigerian" scams, computer fraud and telemarketing fraud.

 

Crimenet: Con Artists and Scams

Part of an Australian site. It is possible to search the pages by name, location or keyword.

 

Protect your money and your dignity

Advice for the elderly in particular from Age UK

 

Offshore Business News & Research

OBNR provides offshore business information on companies and individuals operating in countries where independent and accurate information is often difficult to obtain. Since the launch of its investigative newsletters in February, 1997, the company has exposed numerous frauds in the Bermuda-Caribbean region.

 

The Independent Banking Advisory Service

IBAS exists to give advice to people who are having problems with banks in Britain.

 

National Association of Bank/Insurance Customers

An independent self help group for all private and commercial users of UK bank and insurance services.

 

Global Investor Calendar of Conferences on Crime and Fraud

Details of forthcoming conferences on crime and fraud.

 

Corruption et criminalité économique

A large selection of links from the Strategic Road site which also covers many related topics. There are also details of books in French on corruption.

 

Restitution and Unjust Enrichment

An excellent guide to legal resources from around the world.

 

Shmuel Vaknin's Web Site

Vaknin is an Israeli economist. His site has several articles on financial scandals, including one on the Typology of financial scandals. Although many of Vaknin's articles deal with the Macedonian economy he claims that the Macedonian economic experience is so generic and so widespread, so varied and so concentrated - that it really served as an ideal laboratory.

 

Criminology: Corporate Criminals

An introduction to the subject of corporate crime from a website on criminology.

 

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Some of the stories in its website deal with financial scandals.

 

About Identity Theft

AboutIdentityTheft contains a large collection of articles written by experts who continually update and add new content.

 

Phishing scams that target activities, interests, or news events

Advice from Microsoft on how to avoid frauds.

 

Common Frauds

Information from Lloyd's bank about common frauds involving e-mail messages.

 

A Guide to Computer Crime and Prevention

Information about how to avoid becoming a victim of the common types of computer crime.

 

Common Frauds

Information from Lloyd's bank about common frauds involving e-mail messages.

 

Sophus: Scams

Sophus is a website devoted to exposing Internet hoaxes. This part of it covers common scams.

 

Internet Scambusters

A free electronic newsletter on Internet-based scams. The site has links to other relevant sites.

 

White-Collar Crime Fighter

A monthly newsletter with useful information about the latest frauds, scams and schemes...and the newest and most effective crime-fighting tools, techniques and technologies around.

 

How to Avoid Fraud?

Advice of a Swiss Bank Agent, provided by cs-trans.biz, a network of international business resources, powered by lawyers, academicians, bankers, journalists and translators worldwide,

 

Skolnick's Report

Sherman Skolnick is a legal researcher whose website often has articles about alleged financial wrong-doing.

 

AuditNet's Fraud/Investigative Resources

Links selected by Jim Kaplan of AuditNet.

 

Yahoo Internet Fraud links

 

Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Scams / Frauds

The RCMP website provides information on the latest scams.

 

Quatloos Directory of Scams & Traps

Various categories of common financial scams are explained.

 

Pyramid Schemes

A page by Robert Teeter outlining what is wrong with pyramid schemes and containing links to additional sources of information.

 

The Diligizer Board

This Board has been created for those who seek information regarding the backgrounds of and/or the experiences others have had with individuals/entities who/which have offered or are offering high-yield investment opportunities (HYIP) to investors worldwide.

 

Social Justice and Economic Freedom

A site with emphasis on the political aspects of economic scandals.

 

Bill Tupman's Transnational Crime page

Part of a website maintained by a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. Among the links are some on economic crime.

 

Miscellaneous Articles on Fraud, Corruption etc.

Psychology of Risk, Speculation and Fraud

The text of a speech at the Financial Panel 1997 of the European Research Center, Amsterdam, 11 June, -Will the EMU Pay Off? Anticipating the Effects on the Market, in which a novelist who is herself a former banker explores the motivation of speculators and fraudsters and how the former can degenerate into the latter.

 

Ten of the world's greatest frauds

A list of remarkable frauds from the Times, December 15, 2008.

 

Financial scandals alive and well in 2003

The year in review from MSNBC.com.

 

Corporate crime wave

The New Internationalist magazine devoted its July 2003 issue to this subject.

 

Corporate Malfeasance

An article about how trusted financial market aprofessionals abandoned ethical principles repeatedly, in both bull and bear markets.

 

Value Quotes

Quotations on values and business ethics from Socrates to Hsi-Tang, from Genesis 1:1 to the Dalai Lama, and from Warren Buffett to George W. Bush.

 

Civilising Mammon: Fraud and Profit in Nineteenth-Century London

An account by Paul Johnson, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, of two frauds, one involving the naval hero Lord Cochrane and the other Harry H. Marks, a newspaper editor and member of parliament.

 

Human nature in financial boom and bust cycle

An essay on the scandals of the first few years of the 21st century compared with the situation depicted by Fred Schwed jnr, in his 1940 book, Where Are the Customers' Yachts?.

 

The Cycles of Financial Scandal

A article on waves of financial scandals from the 19th century onwards. New York Times, July 17, 2002.

 

Prime Bank / High Yield Investment Schemes

An article exposing a common scam. The authors are Joel E. Leising and Michael McGarry, two attorneys who are experts on fraud cases.

 

The 100 Top Corporate Criminals

Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. A list of firms ranked by the sizes of fines imposed on them by American courts. There is a brief summary followed an annotated list with more details of the reasons for the fines.

 

Greenspan on Challenges facing community banks

Fraud has been a factor in a number of recent bank failures in the United States, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (March 2000).

 

Financial Regulation in Denmark and Britain

Summary of a thesis by Ben Kjeldsen.

 

Danger - Banks Ahead!

by Sam Vaknin who claims that banks are the most unsafe institutions in the world. Every few years there is a major collapse of hundreds of them worldwide.

 

In Praise of Insider Trading

An article by Matthew O'Keeffe published by the Libertarian Alliance which argues that insider trading should not be a crime.

 

Books on Fraud, Ethics and the Law

Various books on these subjects published by the Institute of Internal Auditors.

 

Institute of International Banking Law & Practice: Fraud Publications

It is possible to place orders online.

 

Episodes of Financial Fraud and Speculation

Thayer Watkins of San José State University discusses a couple of classic cases: Alves Reis, the notorious counterfeiter of Portuguese currency, and the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City.

 

Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes by John Franch

Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905) was one of the most influential and controversial public figures in America. Robber Baron is the first biography of the traction magnate who was behind the Chicago Loop Elevated, an investor in the London Underground, namesake of the University of Chicago's observatory, and vilified as Frank Cowperwood in Theodore Dreiser's trilogy trilogy, The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic.

 

Economic Crime: Beyond Good and Evil

An article in pdf format by Ian O. Angell, LSE Centre for Computer Security. The author claims that the growth of economic crime is a sign of the loss of faith in the nation state and that definitions of crime are simplistic.

 

The Spiral of Fraud

An excerpt from the book "Policy Ensurance" compiled by Tony Braga.

 

The Financial Crime Conference, London 1995

A report of the papers by Jimmy C. Tseng.

 

National Westminster Bank Fraud

A web site created by Umang Malhotra to publicise his disputes with the National Westminster Bank.

Useful Sources for Further Research

Guides to Business Information

MBAOnline Guide to Finance

A guide to relevant resources covering topics such as education, news, financial tools etc.

Web Sites Covering Business News

Financial Times

The website of one of the world's best-known business newspapers.

 

Wall Street Journal

A subscription only site.

 

CNNfn's searchable archive

News items from the CNN Financial Network.

 

BBC Business News

The main news stories from Britain and around the world.

 

Financial Director

The website of a monthly British business magazine.

 

NewsNow

Business news stories. The site is updated every 5 minutes.

General News Sources

Google News

About 4,500 news sources are covered by the search engine. It also has news archives and blog search facilities. Another useful feature is Google News Alerts. If you sign up for that service you will be informed by e-mail of any news related to your interests.

 

Yahoo! News

Another very large categorised directory of news stories.

 

Ananova

A directory of news stories arranged under various categories, including business.

 

Everything News!

Links to a variety of news sources from around the world.

 

Special Libraries Association News Division

The SLA gives information about the availability of newspaper archives on the web.

 

World Wide News Headliner

Direct access to many different Internet news sources.

 

World News Network

The main news stories from around the world.

 

Usenet News

Google Groups

Usenet news is a good source of gossip and information (or misinformation) about scandalous matters! Google not only provides access to current discussions but also has a searchable archive going back, in the case of some groups, all the way to 1981! In addition to the standard keyword searches it allows you to limit searches to particular newsgroups or people or time period, if you select the Advanced Groups Search option.

Miscellaneous

NameBase Public Information Research

NameBase is an online index to names of individuals, groups and corporations compiled from hundreds of investigative books and thousands of pages from periodicals over the past few decades. Areas covered include the international intelligence community, political elites from the Right and Left, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, assassination theory, Latin America, big business, and organized crime.

 

The US National Security Archive

The Archive is simultaneously a research institute on international affairs, a library and archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

 

Due Diligence Investigation & Fraud Investigation Data

This contains about 95,000 names of which the great majority are from the United States, particularly Massachusetts.

 

The Pierpont Column

A regular feature by Trevor Sykes in The Australian Financial Review. The archives go back to 1995.

Magazines, Journals and Books

Ingentaconnect

A full-text database of over 5,000 journals. Individuals who are not members of subscribing organisations may purchase copies of most articles.

 

FindArticles.com

An archive of published articles from magazines on various topics, including business, that you can search for free.

 

Amazon

The world's best-known online book shop has a huge database. Amazon.co.uk is its British branch.

 

Library of Congress

You can search the catalogue of the world's largest library.

 

LibDex

Worldwide index of library catalogues, web sites and Friends of Libraries pages.