Introduction

• Professor Dr. Klaus Henselmann
• Dr. Stefan Hofmann

Fraud is nothing new. History has shown that it has long been part of our society. In 1941, a well-known American judge said: “Fraud is as old as falsehood and as versatile as human ingenuity.” Several years later, in 1949, a criminologist from Indiana University named Edwin H. Sutherland coined the term white-collar crime, referring to fraud committed by the elite upper-world business executive, against either shareholders or the public. Sutherland, one of the pioneers in fraud research, defined white-collar crime as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (“crime in the suits”). On the other hand, Sutherland referred to the murderers, rapists, hooligans and other non-white-collar offenders who plagued society as blue-collar criminals (“crime in the streets”).

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