Fraud in disaster: Rethinking the phases

This paper reexamines the link between disasters and crime to argue that the relationship between the two becomes more evident once the diachronic nature of the disaster is specified. The first section appraises the literature on crime and disaster and calls for more attention to this topic. The subsequent sections of the paper present multiple evidence for the occurrence of crimes and fraud in disasters and the results of preliminary empirical research using U.S. Department of Justice information on the reported white collar and other types of crimes occurring in the aftermath of the Katrina Hurricane and the British Petroleum Gulf Coast oil spill. The findings indicate that crimes and frauds occur during the earliest phases of disasters and that the probability for the occurrence of costlier crimes, akin to white-collar crime, increases, as time elapses. The conclusion calls for a reconceptualization of the phases of disasters.