My colleague Martin Wolf has addressed the guilty plea of the NatWest Three to wire fraud, possibly in return for serving jail sentences in Britain, with a spendidly coruscating attack on the plea bargaining in the US judicial system.

I have nothing to add but I am intrigued by the notion of wire fraud, which crops up all the time in US white-collar crime cases such as the recent conviction of Conrad Black. It has always seemed odd to me that the US treats wire fraud and mail fraud as separate offences from fraud itself, as if the method by which the crime is committed trumps the crime itself.

If I defraud someone by persuading them to give me money on false pretences, should I get off more lightly if they hand me the cash in an envelope physically than if they post it to me, or electronically transfer it to my bank account? I have difficulty understanding why I should.

I am very far from being a legal expert but Wikipedia gives what appears to be a decent rundown of wire fraud and mail fraud in the US legal code.

It mentions the case of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who was charged with wire fraud when copyright infringement would have been a more logical charge. His case was struck down by a federal court in Massachusetts, essentially on the grounds that the prosecution was trying it on.

This paper on the case and mail and wire fraud makes clear that the notion of mail fraud was not intended by Congress simply as equivalent to fraud but was put in place to "protect the integrity of the mails". In other words, fraud by mail was considered a more serious crime than fraud in person.

These days, I suppose, wire fraud covers more or less everything since it is hard to conceive of a fraud of any size that does not involve the use of computers, data networks or the telephone system.

But I still find it strange.

November 30th, 2007 in Uncategorised | Permalink