Throughout most of the 20th Century, organized crime accounted for a tremendous economic costs passed along to consumers, particularly (but hardly exclusively) in large cities like New York, and Chicago, among many others. Originally formed in this country during the Prohibition years in the 1920s, the criminal enterprises that exploited the black market for illegal liquor subsequently branched out to infiltrate other large industries, such as construction, food and liquor distribution, interstate trucking, waste disposal, and the garment industry.
Primarily by penetrating into the leadership organization of unionized industries, organized crime managed to siphon off public funds, "skim" illegal profits from large corporations, and control entire otherwise legitimate industries through intimidation, including labor strikes initiated via its control of labor unions. The result increased the cost of almost everything sold to consumers in the form of goods and services throughout much of the country. In recent years, increased federal law enforcement attention has been devoted to eradicating major organized crime, with mixed levels of success in different industries and in different parts of the country (Hendrie, 2006).
Computer Crime and Identity Theft:
In the first part of the 21st Century, the increased computerization of society inspired a tremendous increase in computer crimes. In some cases,...
The indirect costs of computer crimes are already incorporated into the economic costs of the crimes perpetrated thereby, but the direct costs of computer crime are those borne individuals who must clear their names of criminal association, restore their credit, and monitor all credit-related activity in their names for the foreseeable future, also amounting to many billions of dollars in the U.S.
A annually (Ballezza, 2007).
References
Ballezza, R. (2007) the Social Security Card Application Process: Identity and Credit Card Fraud Issues; FBI Law Enforcement Journal, Vol. 76 No. 5, May/07
Hendrie, E. (2006) Breaking the Bank; FBI Law Enforcement Journal, Vol. 75
No. 7, Jul/06
U.S. Department of Justice (2007) Uniform Crime Reports. Federal Bureau of Investigation Homepage. Accessed October 23, 2007, at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm#cius
