The role of money in economic crime

This article considers how money can motivate crime, influence the opportunity structure governing its occurrence, and serve as a practical instrument facilitating it. Existing theories are engaged based on their assumptions that money (I)fosters attitudes that reduce moral questions to technical problems; (2) gives rise to feelings of self-sufficiency that cause people to become detached from one another and from the webs of social obligation that counteract crime; and (3) diminishes the risk of being caught and makes illegal transactions easier In addition, the argument also introduces the notion of money as a manoeuvre by which to evade entanglement in emotionally straining and risky social relations in which openness can negatively affect status and life project.