C.D. Smith Investigations

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.

 

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.

 

J. Orlin Grabbe's Home Page - Grabbe is a prolific writer on the subject of shady financial dealings and related topics.

 

Corporate Scandals - A directory of stories from NewsMax.com, which describes itself as "America's news page".

 

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.

 

Mario's Cyberspace Station - A website covering espionage, political wrong-doing, and corruption. It is the creation of Mario Profaca, a Croatian journalist. Among the pages are ones on scandalous money and dirty money.

 

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists - Some of the stories in its website deal with financial scandals.

 

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.

 

Phishing scams: 5 ways to help protect your identity - Advice from Microsoft on how to avoid frauds.

 

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

 

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

 

Government Accountability Project - The mission of the US Government Accountability Project is to protect the public interest and promote government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering citizen activists. The site includes some links to whistleblower sites in other countries.

 

Investor Protection Services Alert - The explosion of commercial online services and the rising popularity of the Internet have created new opportunities and new dangers for investors. This section of the Baltic Banking Group website alerts you to the types of investment fraud and abuse used on line and offline and suggests ways to avoid becoming the next victim.

 

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.

 

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 SEC and Prime Bank Instrument Fraud - This article, by Michael A. Collora, first appeared in the Fall 1998 Boston Bar Association Criminal Law Newsletter.

 

Prime Bank Instrument Fraud is Alive and Well - This article by Michael A. Collora was first published in the December 1999 issue of the FT Financial Regulation Report.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

Joseph Abram's You can win against Banks site - This site contains the full story of Joseph Abram's legal disputes with an Australian bank.

Useful Sources for Further Research

Guides to Business Information

Finance, Insurance and Real Estate - An extensive directory of links prepared by Louisiana State University Libraries.

Web Sites Covering Business News

Angry Towers - A source of news, information, and gossip about financial matters. The website is run by a British former foreign exchange trader, Lee Oliver, who dubs himself "Mr Angry".

 

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.

 

News Index - A search engine for current news stories from around the world.

 

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

Ingenta - 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.

 

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.