5 Steps to Prison

“How many times do we have to hear yet another felon talk about how he committed a crime, went to prison and how it just wasn’t worth it?” It would be great if the answer to that question was: Not much longer.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case since arrests for white collar crimes are still on the rise. We keep feeding the felon pool. So you’re probably going to hear more and more and more from us.

Some of us felons care about the rise of white collar crime, the image of our (former) industries and the damage it does and has done to unsuspecting victims. As it turns out, I also care that you don’t have to walk down the same shameful destructive path I did – post crime. And to address the white elephant, some of us also make a living now at risk mitigation, fraud consulting and public speaking.

Many of us have a perception of what fraud is. Fraud is Enron or Bernard Madoff where hundreds of millions of dollars are skimmed, stolen or embezzled. We are lulled into the belief that dollar amounts and publicity define fraud. To our co-workers and colleagues we regurgitate the CNN reports, with our own commentary added in, on how “those despicable So-n-Sos” are disgracing corporate America.

Well, your reiteration of the news and its despicableness (wow, spell check didn’t catch me on that one – big surprise, I’m excited that I got away with something) do fall into the fraud category. But it doesn’t end there.