White Collar Crime Lawyer

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

There is no federal white-collar crime statute — and that is the point

“White collar crime” is a description of a defendant and a method, not a legal category. It entered American usage as a sociological term and never became a chapter of Title 18. Congress has never enacted a general fraud offense. What it enacted instead were statutes that reach any scheme to defraud so long as the scheme touched a particular federal instrumentality: the mails, the wires, a federally insured bank, a health care benefit program, the securities markets, the tax system.

The practical consequence is that the conduct alleged against your client may be a business dispute, a bad quarter, an aggressive billing practice, or an accounting judgment. The charge will be a scheme to defraud, because that is the tool available. Understanding which statute the government has picked, and why, is the first analytical step in any defense.

The statutes that carry the field

Statute	Offense	Statutory maximum	Notes
18 U.S.C. § 1343	Wire fraud	20 years; 30 years and a $1,000,000 fine if the offense affects a financial institution or relates to a presidentially declared major disaster or emergency	The default federal fraud charge
18 U.S.C. § 1341	Mail fraud	Same as § 1343	Reaches private and commercial interstate carriers, not just the Postal Service
18 U.S.C. § 1346	Defines “scheme or artifice to defraud” to include honest-services fraud	—	A definition, not a free-standing offense
18 U.S.C. § 1349	Attempt and conspiracy, chapter 63	Same as the object offense	No overt-act element
18 U.S.C. § 1344	Bank fraud	30 years, $1,000,000 fine	Two distinct clauses, different elements
18 U.S.C. § 1347	Health care fraud	10 years; 20 if serious bodily injury; life if death results
18 U.S.C. § 1348	Securities and commodities fraud	25 years
18 U.S.C. § 1956	Money laundering	20 years	Requires a design: promotion, concealment, or evasion
18 U.S.C. § 1957	Monetary transactions in criminally derived property	10 years	No design element; over $10,000 is the threshold
18 U.S.C. § 641	Theft or conversion of federal money or property	10 years; 1 year if value does not exceed $1,000
18 U.S.C. § 656	Embezzlement by a bank officer or employee	30 years, $1,000,000 fine
18 U.S.C. § 666	Theft or bribery in programs receiving federal funds	10 years	$5,000 value threshold
26 U.S.C. § 7201	Tax evasion	5 years, $100,000 fine ($500,000 corporate)	Requires an affirmative act
26 U.S.C. § 7206	False return; aiding and assisting	3 years	The most commonly charged tax felony
18 U.S.C. § 371	General conspiracy	5 years, or the misdemeanor maximum if the object is a misdemeanor	Requires an overt act

Table: the core federal white-collar statutes and their maximum penalties, with the text of each linked to the U.S. Code.

Two features of that table deserve emphasis because they shape every case. First, the maximums are large and the statutes overlap: a single course of conduct can be charged as wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, producing an indictment with dozens of counts arising from one set of facts. Second, the maximum is almost never the sentence. The federal sentencing framework produces a range driven by loss and other guideline factors, and that range is usually far below the statutory ceiling. A twenty-count wire fraud indictment does not mean four hundred years; it means the government has multiplied the same scheme across the number of emails it can prove.

How a federal white-collar case is actually built

Federal fraud cases are made by documents and cooperators, in that order. There is rarely an eyewitness. There is nearly always a paper record — invoices, emails, bank statements, loan files, billing data — and a person inside the transaction who has already spoken to the government.

The typical sequence looks like this.

1. A referral or a data hit. The case begins with a regulator (the SEC, HHS-OIG, FinCEN, a bank’s suspicious activity report), a whistleblower, a disgruntled employee, or a data-analytics screen that flagged an outlier billing or trading pattern.
2. A covert phase. Subpoenas go to banks and third parties. The target is not told. Grand jury subpoenas issued to a bank are accompanied by non-disclosure requests, so the first the target learns of the case may be an agent at the door.
3. A witness phase. Employees, vendors, accountants and former partners are interviewed. Some are given proffer agreements. Some become cooperating witnesses.
4. Contact with the target. An interview attempt, a subpoena, or a target letter. This is the point at which counsel must be involved, and it is the point at which the most damaging mistakes are made.
5. Charging. An indictment, or, where the case is resolving, an information following a plea agreement.

Each of those phases has its own defense work, and the leverage available at phase 2 or 3 is far greater than the leverage available after an indictment is returned. That is the core strategic fact about white-collar defense and the reason the pre-indictment period matters more here than in almost any other area of federal practice.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: The first document I want in a fraud matter is not the indictment. It is the set of communications the government will use to prove intent — the emails and messages around the transaction, in date order, with what the client actually knew at each point. A scheme narrative is built by selecting from that record. The defense is built by restoring the parts that were left out.

The two statutes at the center: §§ 1341 and 1343

Wire fraud and mail fraud are the same offense with a different jurisdictional hook. Both punish a “scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.” Mail fraud requires a use of the mails or a private or commercial interstate carrier; wire fraud requires a transmission “by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce.”

The elements a jury must find are, in substance:

1. a scheme to defraud, or to obtain money or property by material false pretenses;
2. the defendant’s knowing and willing participation in that scheme with intent to defraud; and
3. a use of the wires (or the mails) in furtherance of the scheme.

The third element is the weakest limit. Almost any modern commercial act involves an interstate wire — an email, a wire transfer, a card authorisation, a phone call. Courts have repeatedly held that the wire need not itself be false or essential; it need only be used in furtherance of the scheme. The federal hook is therefore not much of a hook at all, and defense energy is better spent on the first two elements.

The penalty structure carries a trap worth knowing. The base maximum for both statutes is 20 years. But where the offense “affects a financial institution” — or relates to a presidentially declared major disaster or emergency, a provision that did enormous work in pandemic-relief prosecutions — the maximum rises to 30 years and the fine to $1,000,000. The same escalation triggers a ten-year statute of limitations under 18 U.S.C. § 3293 instead of the general five years. Whether a scheme “affects a financial institution” is therefore not a detail; it can double the limitations period and add a decade to the exposure. Our wire fraud lawyer page takes the elements, the circuit law and the recent Supreme Court cases in full.

What the Supreme Court has actually done to fraud law since 2010

This is the part of federal fraud law that has moved most, and it is the part competitor pages most often describe as it stood a decade ago. Five decisions define the current landscape. Four of them narrowed the government’s theories. The fifth, in 2025, did not.

Skilling (2010): honest-services fraud means bribes and kickbacks

Section 1346 provides that a “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme to deprive another of “the intangible right of honest services.” Read literally, that language would criminalize any breach of a duty of loyalty. In Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010), the Court avoided the vagueness problem by construing the section narrowly, holding that “§ 1346 covers only bribery and kickback schemes.”

That holding does real work. Undisclosed self-dealing is not honest-services fraud. A conflict of interest is not honest-services fraud. If the indictment’s honest-services theory is not built on a bribe or a kickback, it is not built on anything § 1346 reaches.

Kelly (2020): the object of the scheme must be money or property

In Kelly v. United States, 590 U.S. 391 (2020) — the Bridgegate case — the Court reversed convictions arising from a politically motivated realignment of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge. The government had proved deception. That was not enough. The fraud statutes are “limited in scope to the protection of property rights,” and the government must show “not only that the defendants engaged in deception, but that an ‘object of the[ir] fraud [was] property.'”

Two propositions from Kelly recur in defense motions. First, a government’s regulatory prerogatives — its “intangible rights of allocation, exclusion, and control” — are an exercise of “sovereign power to regulate,” not property. Second, and more broadly useful, where the property allegedly taken is only an incidental cost of the scheme rather than its object, the conviction cannot stand: “a property fraud conviction cannot stand when the loss to the victim is only an incidental byproduct of the scheme.” Employee time consumed in implementing a decision is the paradigm example.

Ciminelli (2023): the right-to-control theory is dead

For roughly thirty years the Second Circuit permitted convictions on a “right to control” theory: that a victim deprived of “potentially valuable economic information necessary to make discretionary economic decisions” had been deprived of property. In Ciminelli v. United States, 598 U.S. 306 (2023), the Court held unanimously that the theory “is not a valid basis for liability under § 1343.” Such information “is not a traditional property interest.”

The Court also refused to salvage the conviction on an alternative property theory the jury had never been instructed on, citing the rule that “[a]ppellate courts are not permitted to affirm convictions on any theory they please simply because the facts necessary to support the theory were presented to the jury.” For anyone with a pre-2023 conviction resting on right-to-control instructions, that is a point worth raising with counsel, and it is the kind of intervening-decision question a § 2255 motion is built to test.

Percoco (2023): who owes the public honest services

Percoco v. United States, 598 U.S. 319 (2023), rejected the jury instruction that a private citizen owes the public a duty of honest services whenever he “dominated and controlled any governmental business” and government employees “actually relied on him because of a special relationship.” That standard, drawn from the Second Circuit’s Margiotta decision, “is too vague.”

Percoco is frequently overstated in both directions. The Court did not hold that a private citizen can never owe such a duty: it expressly “reject[ed] the argument that a person nominally outside public employment can never have the necessary fiduciary duty to the public,” and pointed to genuine agency relationships as a route to one. What it held was that the duty must be defined “with the clarity typical of criminal statutes.”

Kousisis (2025): the narrowing has a floor

Then the direction changed. In Kousisis v. United States, 605 U.S. 114 (2025), the Court held that “[a] defendant who induces a victim to enter into a transaction under materially false pretenses may be convicted of federal fraud even if the defendant did not seek to cause the victim economic loss.” The wire fraud statute, the Court said, “is agnostic about economic loss. The statute does not so much as mention loss, let alone require it.”

Two things about Kousisis matter for defense work.

First, it forecloses the argument — which had been gaining traction after Ciminelli — that a defendant who delivered full value cannot have committed fraud. The Court expressly distinguished the fraudulent-inducement theory from the right-to-control theory it had rejected two years earlier: “Unlike the right-to-control theory, fraudulent inducement does not treat ‘mere information as the protected interest.’ Rather, it protects money and property.”

Second, it relocates the fight to materiality. The Court “reiterate[d] ‘that materiality of falsehood is an element of’ — and thus a limit on — the federal fraud statutes,” and said a fraudulent-inducement conviction “cannot be sustained without it.” It then declined to define the standard. That leaves an open and genuinely contested question about how material a misrepresentation must be when the victim received what it paid for, and it is where the next round of litigation in this area will happen.

Theory	Status after 2025	Controlling case
Deprivation of money or property	Valid — the core theory	Kelly, 590 U.S. 391
Honest services via bribes or kickbacks	Valid, but confined to bribes and kickbacks	Skilling, 561 U.S. 358
Honest services via undisclosed self-dealing	Not reached by § 1346	Skilling, 561 U.S. 358
Honest services by a private citizen who “dominated and controlled” government business	Invalid — unconstitutionally vague instruction	Percoco, 598 U.S. 319
Right to control one’s assets / valuable economic information	Invalid	Ciminelli, 598 U.S. 306
Depriving a government of regulatory prerogatives	Not property	Kelly, 590 U.S. 391
Fraudulent inducement with no intended economic loss	Valid — loss is not an element	Kousisis, 605 U.S. 114

Table: which federal fraud theories survive, as of the 2025 Term. Every entry is a holding of the case named, not a characterisation.

The conspiracy count: § 1349, not § 371

This is the single most consequential thing about a federal fraud indictment that general-audience pages omit, and it is worth stating precisely.

The general federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, requires that “two or more persons conspire” and that “one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy.” It carries a maximum of five years — or, if the object offense is a misdemeanor, “the punishment for such conspiracy shall not exceed the maximum punishment provided for such misdemeanor.”

Section 1349 is different in both respects. It provides that any person “who attempts or conspires to commit any offense under this chapter shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt or conspiracy.” Chapter 63 of Title 18 includes mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, health care fraud and securities fraud. And because § 1349 does not mention an overt act, courts have held that none is required. The Second Circuit so held in United States v. Roy, 783 F.3d 418, 420 (2d Cir. 2015): “proof of an overt act is not required for a conspiracy conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1349.” The reasoning follows Whitfield v. United States, 543 U.S. 209, 214 (2005), which held that where a conspiracy statute’s text “does not expressly make the commission of an overt act an element of the conspiracy offense, the Government need not prove an overt act to obtain a conviction.”

	18 U.S.C. § 371	18 U.S.C. § 1349
Overt act required	Yes — an act to effect the object	No
Maximum penalty	5 years (or the misdemeanor cap)	Same as the object offense — up to 20 or 30 years for a fraud object
Objects covered	Any offense against the United States, or defrauding the United States	Any offense in chapter 63 (fraud)
Victim must be the United States	For the “defraud” prong, yes	No — a private victim suffices
Practical effect on limitations	Runs from the last overt act	No overt-act anchor

Table: the § 371 / § 1349 comparison. A fraud conspiracy charged under § 1349 exposes a defendant to the full penalty of the completed offense without proof that anything was ever done to carry it out.

Why this matters in practice:

• Agreement alone can convict. Under § 1349 the government need not prove that a single step was taken. Evidence that a defendant agreed to a scheme that others executed is sufficient. Defenses built around “my client never did anything” are aimed at an element that is not there.
• The exposure is identical to the substantive count. A defendant who joined a wire fraud conspiracy affecting a financial institution faces the same 30-year maximum as one who executed it.
• Withdrawal is harder to date. Withdrawal from a conspiracy requires affirmative action inconsistent with the object and communicated to co-conspirators. Without an overt-act framework, the limitations analysis loses a natural anchor.
• Charging one defendant reaches the conduct of others. Conspiracy liability, combined with relevant-conduct rules at sentencing, means a peripheral participant can be scored for losses caused by people he never met — subject to reasonable foreseeability limits that are among the most productive objections available at sentencing.

Sentencing: the loss table, not the charging statute

Almost every fraud offense in Title 18 is referenced to a single guideline, U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1. The base offense level is 7 where the statutory maximum is twenty years or more, and 6 otherwise. Everything above that is driven by adjustments, and the largest by far is loss.

The § 2B1.1(b)(1) loss table, November 1, 2025

Loss (apply the greatest)	Increase in offense level
$6,500 or less	no increase
More than $6,500	add 2
More than $15,000	add 4
More than $40,000	add 6
More than $95,000	add 8
More than $150,000	add 10
More than $250,000	add 12
More than $550,000	add 14
More than $1,500,000	add 16
More than $3,500,000	add 18
More than $9,500,000	add 20
More than $25,000,000	add 22
More than $65,000,000	add 24
More than $150,000,000	add 26
More than $250,000,000	add 28
More than $550,000,000	add 30

Table: U.S.S.G. § 2B1.1(b)(1), Guidelines Manual effective November 1, 2025. Reproduced because the loss figure, not the statute of conviction, is what moves a federal fraud sentence.

A defendant convicted of a twenty-year-maximum fraud starts at level 7. If the loss is found to be $2,000,000, the loss table alone adds 16 levels. Nothing about the charging decision produced that; the loss finding did.

How “loss” is defined — and where the definition now lives

Loss is “the greater of actual loss or intended loss.” Actual loss means “the reasonably foreseeable pecuniary harm that resulted from the offense.” Intended loss means “the pecuniary harm that the defendant purposely sought to inflict,” and it “includes intended pecuniary harm that would have been impossible or unlikely to occur.” Pecuniary harm is harm “that is monetary or that otherwise is readily measurable in money” — which excludes emotional distress and reputational harm. Where there is a loss but it “reasonably cannot be determined,” the court may use the defendant’s gain as an alternative measure.

Those definitions appear in the Notes to Table within § 2B1.1(b)(1) itself, not in commentary. That placement is deliberate and it matters: courts had begun to question whether an “intended loss” definition found only in application notes was binding. It is now in the guideline.

The other drivers

Loss is the largest single input but rarely the only one. In a typical white-collar case the following also appear:

• § 2B1.1(b)(2) — victims and hardship. Two levels for 10 or more victims, mass-marketing, or substantial financial hardship to one or more victims; four levels for substantial financial hardship to five or more; six for 25 or more.
• § 2B1.1(b)(7) — federal health care offenses involving a government health care program: +2 above $1,000,000 in loss, +3 above $7,000,000, +4 above $20,000,000. This is why healthcare cases score higher than their loss figures alone suggest, and why the healthcare fraud attorney analysis is a separate exercise.
• § 2B1.1(b)(10) — relocating a scheme to evade law enforcement, committing a substantial part of it from outside the United States, or sophisticated means, +2, with a floor of level 12. The sophisticated-means enhancement is contested in a very large share of fraud sentencings because ordinary business structures — an LLC, a second bank account — are routinely characterized as sophistication.
• § 2B1.1(b)(17) — deriving more than $1,000,000 in gross receipts from financial institutions (+2), or substantially jeopardizing the safety and soundness of a financial institution or the solvency of a public company or a 1,000-employee organization (+4).
• Chapter Three adjustments — aggravating role, abuse of a position of trust or use of a special skill, obstruction, and acceptance of responsibility.

What Amendment 836 changed, effective November 1, 2025

This is current, load-bearing, and widely un-updated.

Application Note 21 to § 2B1.1 — “Departure Considerations” — was struck in its entirety. That note contained both the upward-departure factors and, more importantly for defendants, subsection (C), the downward-departure provision for cases in which “the offense level determined under this guideline substantially overstates the seriousness of the offense,” together with its worked securities-fraud example about diffuse aggregate loss. It is gone from the Manual.

Chapter Five, Part H is deleted. The 2025 Guidelines Manual’s table of contents lists “Part H ― [Deleted].” The specific-offender-characteristic policy statements that defense memoranda relied on for decades — age, mental and emotional condition, family ties and responsibilities, employment record, civic contributions — are no longer in the book.

Section 1B1.1 was restructured from three steps to two. The old subsection (b), directing courts to “consider Parts H and K of Chapter Five, Specific Offender Characteristics and Departures,” was struck. The new subsection (b) is headed “Step Two: Consideration of Factors Set Forth in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a).” The defined term “departure” was removed from the § 1B1.1 application notes altogether. Chapter Five, Part K survives, and now enters at § 1B1.1(a)(9) — “Apply, as appropriate, Part K of Chapter Five.”

The Commission framed all of this as outcome-neutral: facts that formerly supported a departure remain available to support a variance under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). But the drafting consequence is concrete. A sentencing memorandum that asks for a “downward departure under § 2B1.1 comment. (n.21)” or a “§ 5H1.6 departure for extraordinary family circumstances” is now asking for relief under provisions that no longer exist. The same facts, presented as a § 3553(a) variance argument, are unaffected. Getting that framing right is part of what a current federal sentencing practice does.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: The loss figure in the presentence report is a finding, not a fact. It is produced by a probation officer working from the government’s spreadsheet, and it is frequently the least tested number in the case. Whether credits against loss were applied, whether “intended” loss reflects what the defendant actually sought to inflict rather than what a schedule of face values adds up to, and whether an amount is attributable to this defendant rather than to the scheme as a whole — those are litigable, and they move the range further than almost anything else available at sentencing.

We do not predict sentences and we do not publish sentencing ranges for a reader’s own case. The guidelines are advisory, the loss finding is contested, and the § 3553(a) analysis is individual. What we can say is which inputs decide the outcome, and the answer is: the loss finding first, the enhancements second, the statute of conviction a distant third.

Parallel proceedings: the problem that defines white-collar practice

A white-collar target frequently faces more than one proceeding arising from the same conduct — a criminal investigation, a civil enforcement action by a regulator, an administrative licensing or exclusion proceeding, and sometimes private civil litigation.

The Supreme Court settled the government’s right to do this in United States v. Kordel, 397 U.S. 1 (1970). It “would stultify enforcement of federal law,” the Court said, “to require a governmental agency … invariably to choose either to forgo recommendation of a criminal prosecution once it seeks civil relief, or to defer civil proceedings pending the ultimate outcome of a criminal trial.”

Kordel also marks the limits, and they are the limits defense counsel litigates. The Court expressly reserved cases where the government “has brought a civil action solely to obtain evidence for its criminal prosecution,” where it “failed to advise the defendant in its civil proceeding that it contemplates his criminal prosecution,” where the defendant is unrepresented, or where there are “other special circumstances that might suggest the unconstitutionality or even the impropriety of this criminal prosecution.”

The practical dangers are these:

• Civil discovery is a deposition the prosecutor gets for free. Testimony in a parallel civil case is available to the criminal prosecutors. Kordel holds that a defendant who answers without asserting the privilege “is in no position to complain now that he was compelled to give testimony against himself.”
• Invoking the Fifth has civil consequences. In a civil case an adverse inference may be drawn from a party’s invocation. In a criminal case it may not. Choosing between them is a real cost, and it is why staying the civil case is often the first motion filed.
• A corporation has no privilege. Kordel holds that a corporation served with interrogatories must “appoint an agent who could, without fear of self-incrimination, furnish such requested information as was available to the corporation,” and cannot discharge that duty by pointing to an officer who intends to invoke. Where genuinely no such agent exists, the Court assumed the remedy would be a protective order postponing civil discovery — but it did not decide the question, and it remains a live one.
• Employees and the company are not aligned. An internal investigation conducted by company counsel is not confidential as to the employee. The company can and often does produce the interview memoranda to the government.

Where the parallel proceeding is an SEC enforcement matter, the sequence has its own vocabulary and its own decision points; that is the subject of our securities fraud attorney section and its dedicated page on SEC investigations.

The pre-indictment window

More white-collar cases are shaped before charges than after. Three moments matter.

The target letter. The Justice Manual — JM § 9-11.151, on advice of “rights” to grand jury witnesses — distinguishes among a target (a person as to whom the prosecutor has substantial evidence linking them to the commission of a crime and who is a putative defendant), a subject (a person whose conduct is within the scope of the grand jury’s investigation), and a witness. The label is not binding and it changes. Receiving a subject letter is not reassurance; subjects become targets routinely.

The grand jury subpoena. A subpoena for documents (duces tecum) is not the same as a subpoena to testify. Both require careful handling. An individual has a Fifth Amendment act-of-production privilege in some circumstances; an entity does not. Producing responsive documents without first understanding what they show is a common and expensive error.

The proffer. A proffer session — sometimes called a “queen for a day” — is conducted under an agreement that typically prevents the government from using the statements in its case-in-chief but preserves derivative use and use for impeachment or rebuttal. A proffer that goes badly does not merely fail; it narrows the defenses available at trial, because the agreement’s rebuttal provision can permit the government to introduce the proffer statements if the defense advances an inconsistent theory. The decision to proffer is among the most consequential in the case.

What counsel can do in this window that cannot be done later: present exculpatory material to the prosecutor before a charging decision, contest the loss theory before it is fixed in an indictment, negotiate the charge itself rather than the plea to a charge already returned, and, in appropriate cases, persuade the government that the matter belongs in a civil or administrative forum.

Limitations periods

Offense	Limitations period	Source
Federal offenses generally	5 years	18 U.S.C. § 3282(a)
Bank fraud (§ 1344); embezzlement by a bank officer (§ 656); false statements on loan applications (§ 1014)	10 years	18 U.S.C. § 3293
Mail or wire fraud if the offense affects a financial institution	10 years	18 U.S.C. § 3293(2)
Tax offenses involving defrauding the United States, and § 371 conspiracies whose object is tax evasion	6 years	26 U.S.C. § 6531

Table: the limitations periods that actually govern white-collar charges. Note that § 3293 doubles the period for ordinary wire fraud whenever the government can characterize the scheme as affecting a financial institution.

Section 3293 provides that no person shall be prosecuted for the listed offenses “unless the indictment is returned or the information is filed within 10 years after the commission of the offense.” The listed offenses include §§ 215, 656, 657, 1005, 1006, 1007, 1014, 1033 and 1344, and — critically — §§ 1341 and 1343 “if the offense affects a financial institution.”

For continuing schemes, when the limitations clock starts is itself a contested question, and it is one of the few purely legal defenses that can dispose of counts before trial.

Restitution, forfeiture, and the money after the sentence

A federal fraud sentence rarely ends with the custodial term.

Restitution is mandatory for offenses against property under Title 18 committed by fraud or deceit, under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3663A. Mandatory means the court has no discretion to decline it based on the defendant’s ability to pay, though ability to pay governs the schedule. Restitution is measured by the victim’s actual loss — which is not the same figure as guideline loss, and the difference is worth litigating.

Forfeiture is separate and additional. 18 U.S.C. § 982 provides for criminal forfeiture in fraud and money-laundering cases, reaching property “constituting, derived from, or traceable to” the proceeds. A defendant can owe restitution to victims and forfeiture to the government on the same dollars.

Collateral consequences frequently outlast both: professional license revocation, securities-industry and banking bars, suspension and debarment from federal contracting, exclusion from federal health care programs, and immigration consequences for non-citizens, since most fraud offenses with a loss exceeding $10,000 are aggravated felonies. A plea that looks favorable on the custodial term can be ruinous on the collateral side. Those consequences should be mapped before the plea, not discovered after it.

What a real white-collar defense consists of

There is no single template, but the productive lines of attack recur.

Intent. Fraud requires intent to defraud. Business failure, optimism, aggressive but disclosed practices, and reliance on professionals are not fraud. A documented good-faith basis — legal advice, accountant sign-off, an auditor’s acceptance, a disclosed risk — is the most valuable evidence in most of these cases, and it is usually already in the client’s files.

Materiality. After Kousisis, materiality is the operative limit on the fraudulent-inducement theory, and the Court left its content undefined. Where the victim received what it bargained for, whether the misrepresentation was material is a live question rather than a formality.

Theory. Is the government’s theory one the Supreme Court has approved? Right-to-control is dead. Regulatory prerogatives are not property. Honest services means bribes and kickbacks. An indictment that pleads a theory rather than a property deprivation is vulnerable on a motion to dismiss.

Attribution. In multi-defendant cases, the question is not whether a scheme existed but what this defendant knew, agreed to, and could reasonably foresee. That question controls both conviction and the loss figure.

Loss. Credits against loss, the actual-versus-intended question, causation, and whether the government’s spreadsheet reflects a defensible methodology. This is where the sentence is actually decided.

Suppression and grand jury issues. Fourth Amendment challenges to searches of servers, phones and cloud accounts; taint-team problems where privileged material was seized; and, occasionally, grand jury abuse.

If a conviction has already been entered, the questions change but do not close. Direct review runs through the federal appeals process; claims that depend on facts outside the trial record — including ineffective assistance and intervening decisions like Ciminelli — run through a § 2255 motion. Where a sentence has become unjust because of circumstances arising after it was imposed, compassionate release under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) is a separate route, and the credit and placement mechanisms that govern time actually served are covered in our early release pages.

Where to go next on white collar offenses

This page is the overview. Each offense below has its own analysis, with the elements, the controlling circuit law and the defenses that are specific to it.

Fraud and financial offenses

• wire fraud lawyer — §§ 1341 and 1343, the Ciminelli/Percoco/Kelly/Kousisis line, and honest services in full
• tax fraud lawyer — §§ 7201, 7206 and 7203, the Cheek willfulness standard, and the civil-to-criminal referral
• money laundering attorney — the § 1956 / § 1957 distinction, which is misstated on most sites
• embezzlement lawyer — §§ 641, 656 and 666, and the intent requirement the statutes do not state
• bank fraud attorney — § 1344’s two clauses, Loughrin, Shaw, and the ten-year limitations period

The two specialist areas

Securities and SEC enforcement

• securities fraud attorney — Rule 10b-5, § 1348, scienter, and the criminal/civil split
• insider trading defense — the Dirks/Newman/Salman personal-benefit line and Rule 10b5-1
• SEC investigation defense — the formal order, the Wells notice, and parallel proceedings
• Ponzi and investment fraud defense — loss calculation, receiverships, and the “no legitimate business” theory

Health care fraud

• healthcare fraud attorney — § 1347, exclusion, and the payor-program framework
• Medicare fraud defense — audits, extrapolation, payment suspension, and the 60-day rule
• Anti-Kickback and Stark defense — criminal intent versus strict liability, and the safe-harbor asymmetry
• False Claims Act and qui tam defense — the seal, Escobar materiality, and civil investigative demands

Related practice areas already on this site

• federal criminal defense attorney — the firm-wide overview of federal practice
• federal sentencing — guideline calculation, objections, and § 3553(a) advocacy
• federal appeals — direct review, preserved and plain error, and invalid-theory claims
• § 2255 motion — post-conviction claims resting on facts outside the trial record

Each of the thirteen offense pages above is written for the person accused, not for a victim, an investor seeking recovery, or a whistleblower. Readers who arrive here from a search phrased the other way should know that at the outset. The starting point for the whole area is this white collar crime lawyer overview; everything else on the list narrows it.

Frequently Asked Questions About White Collar Crime Charges

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026