BP Editors
In perhaps the most famous white collar crime of all time, Enron repeatedly lied to its staff and the world at large, projecting profit lines on future imaginary investments that rarely, if ever, came to fruition. Through repeated institutionalized fraud, Enron’s executives and traders were able to funnel millions to themselves while their company’s investments tanked. By 2001, Enron was billions of dollars in debt, and went belly up. Several of the executives were sentenced to prison time, but the company’s creator and former owner Kenneth Lay died of a heart attack before he could begin serving his 45 years for securities and wire fraud. Countless employees of Enron were left pensionless, and the reverberations of Enron and similar behavior would come to define the following decade’s global economic collapse.
