Financial Cost

• Swindles, fraud and embezzlement usually aim to take far more than the average street crime or burglary. In 1980, white collar criminals cost American businesses $50 billion, ten times the amount of all forms of street crime for that same year. Figures from the mid-nineties given by the FBI and W. Steve Albrecht, professor of accounting at Brigham Young University showed that the combined cost of robbery and burglary were around $4 billion a year, while the cost of white-collar fraud was estimated at $200 billion a year. According to the Cornell Legal Information Institute, it was estimated in 2010 that white collar crime cost the U.S. $300 billion.
  
  

Loss of Jobs

• One kind of white collar crime, familiar to many from the Enron scandal, is the deliberate overestimation of a company's value in order to artificially inflate the value of the company's shares. This allows company partners to derive huge profits from the sale of shares. This, and other forms of dishonest practices, can result in the sudden collapse of the company when the crime is discovered; resulting in sudden job losses -- 4,000 in the case of the Enron scandal. Many of these employees also lost their savings in the collapse of the company.
  
  

Deaths

• White collar crime can involve deliberate neglect, use of hazardous materials or dangerous practices in order to cut costs or protect the company's public image. A notorious example of this given by Russ Long, professor of sociology at Del Mar College, citing Ralph Nadar, involved a model of the Ford Pinto which could explode following rear-end collisions. The company was aware of the defect which caused this to happen but chose to save costs by paying settlements to victims of crashes rather than recall and repair the defective vehicles.
  
  

Undermining Faith in the Criminal Justice System

• White collar criminals tend to be given far more lenient sentences than perpetrators of "street crimes". Another example given by Russ Long describes how C. Arnolt Smith, Chairman of U.S. National Bank, carried out a massive fraud which may have been one of the largest in American history and yet was given a fine of only $30,000, payable in monthly installments $100 with no interest on the total amount. The combination of expensive lawyers, vested interests, favorable discrimination towards the wealthy and lack of attention from the media may cause this disparity in sentencing and make it difficult for people to see how the criminal justice system and the government which operates it can be regarded as legitimate.