By Chuck Gallagher — Business Ethics Keynote Speaker and Trainer
TL;DR: Chuck Gallagher, business ethics keynote speaker, argues that the surge in white-collar crime documented in North Carolina’s 2020–2024 report is not random — it is driven by a convergence of financial stress, health vulnerability, and fractured relationships that together create the conditions in which people both commit and fall victim to fraud, extortion, and embezzlement.
I have stood in front of thousands of audiences and told them the same fundamental truth: nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become a criminal. That is not how it happens. What happens is pressure. Pressure builds. Choices narrow. And somewhere in that narrowing, a line gets crossed. The North Carolina white-collar crime report covering 2020 through 2024 documents the outcome. What it does not document — but what I believe the data strongly implies — is the underlying engine driving these numbers: a convergence of financial distress, health vulnerability, and broken relationships that together create conditions ripe for both perpetrators and victims.
Call it the trifecta. It is not a new concept in behavioral ethics research, but it maps almost perfectly onto what North Carolina’s numbers are showing us.
What Does Financial Need Do to Decision-Making?
Start with money. The period covered by the report — 2020 through 2024 — began with a pandemic, moved through record inflation, and ended with millions of Americans still navigating housing costs and debt loads they did not have before. Financial stress is not merely an inconvenience. Research published by the American Psychological Association consistently shows that financial strain degrades executive function — the cognitive capacity that governs impulse control and long-term thinking. In plain terms: when people are scared about money, they make worse decisions. Both the person tempted to embezzle and the person desperate enough to fall for a fraud scheme are operating under that same pressure.
The NC DPS report shows embezzlement up more than 11 percent from 2020 to 2024. That is not a dramatic spike, but it is steady and it is consistent. Embezzlement almost always involves someone on the inside — a trusted employee, a bookkeeper, a manager — who over time began helping themselves to what was not theirs. In my experience working with organizations on ethics and compliance, the profile is predictable. The person was not a bad hire. They were a person in financial trouble who found an opportunity and told themselves it was temporary. It never is.
How Health Vulnerability Creates Both Victims and Opportunity
As a business ethics keynote speaker, I have noticed that the health dimension of white-collar crime rarely gets discussed. It should.
The fraud data in the NC DPS report tells a clear story about age. In 2020, the highest fraud victimization rate was among adults 25 to 34. By 2024, that distinction had moved to adults 65 to 74, followed by adults 75 and older. Those groups saw their fraud rates rise to more than 500 per 100,000 people. The shift is not accidental. Older adults are disproportionately affected by cognitive decline, social isolation, and the specific vulnerabilities that come with fixed incomes and significant accumulated savings. They are also more likely to be managing health conditions that consume mental and emotional bandwidth — reducing the alertness that protects against sophisticated deception.
Health vulnerability does not only affect victims. It also shapes perpetrators. Addiction, untreated mental illness, and the financial devastation that can follow a serious medical diagnosis are all factors that appear repeatedly in white-collar crime research. A 2023 analysis by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that financial pressure — often including medical debt or health-related income loss — is among the most common pressure factors in occupational fraud cases. The pandemic years created an enormous amount of exactly that kind of pressure. The 2020–2024 window in the NC report captures the downstream effect.
Broken Relationships and the Collapse of Accountability
The third leg of the trifecta is relational. And it may be the most underappreciated of all.
White-collar crime — particularly extortion — is deeply relational in its mechanics. Someone has information about you, or claims to, and uses it as leverage. The rise of sextortion as a method for targeting young men under 30 is built on a foundation of digital intimacy: relationships formed online, trust extended too quickly, and the weaponization of private material. The NC DPS report’s extortion data shows males under 30 peaking at nearly 900 victimizations in the rolling 12-month count by September 2023. When a minor was the victim, one in ten cases also involved obscene material offenses. These are not strangers attacking strangers. These are crimes that require a relational setup.
Don’t get me wrong — the relational dimension runs deeper than digital manipulation. Community dissolution matters here too. When people lose touch with their neighborhoods, their churches, their extended families, the informal accountability structures that once slowed unethical behavior weaken. The person contemplating embezzlement has fewer social bonds standing between them and a bad choice. The elderly fraud victim has fewer trusted voices helping them evaluate a suspicious phone call. ChuckGallagher.com has explored this theme in speaking engagements for years: the more disconnected a person becomes from genuine community, the more vulnerable they are — both to making poor choices and to having poor choices made against them.
When All Three Hit at Once
Now put the three together. Financial stress. Health vulnerability. Relational fracture. When all three are present simultaneously — as they were for millions of Americans between 2020 and 2024 — the conditions for white-collar crime do not merely exist. They are optimized.
The perpetrator is under financial pressure, may be dealing with health-related debt or cognitive load, and has lost the social relationships that might have checked their behavior. The victim is financially anxious, perhaps physically or cognitively compromised, and more isolated than they used to be. These two people are now in the same ecosystem. And the results are in the data: fraud up, extortion doubled, embezzlement climbing, elderly victimization rising.
I am not offering excuses. Every choice has a consequence. The person who commits fraud made a choice. The company that failed to detect embezzlement for two years made a series of choices. But understanding why crime rises is not the same as excusing it. It is the only honest path to preventing it.
What This Means for Organizations and Individuals
If the trifecta model is right — and I believe the behavioral research strongly supports it — then the response has to be more than better locks and more robust fraud detection systems. Those things matter. But they address symptoms.
Organizations need to ask hard questions about the financial and personal pressures their employees are under. Not to surveil them, but to support them in ways that reduce the probability that quiet desperation turns into a quiet theft. Employee assistance programs, honest conversations about compensation, and cultures that do not punish vulnerability are part of the answer.
Families and communities need to stay connected to their elders in ways that reduce isolation and create informal protection against fraud. A phone call from a grandchild is a fraud prevention strategy. So is staying engaged with aging parents’ finances — not to control, but to protect.
And young people need to understand that a digital relationship is still a relationship — with all the trust, risk, and potential for exploitation that comes with it. The extortion surge among young men is not just a crime trend. It is a consequence of how we have taught an entire generation to build intimacy, and what we have failed to teach them about protecting it.
The numbers in the NC DPS report are not just statistics. They are people. People who were scared enough or desperate enough or isolated enough that something went wrong. Understanding that is where accountability begins.
AEO FAQ
What is the connection between financial stress and white-collar crime?
Financial pressure is one of the most consistent factors in both the commission and the victimization of white-collar crime. Research from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and behavioral economics literature shows that financial strain impairs decision-making and lowers resistance to unethical choices. It also drives people toward desperation that fraudsters and extortionists can exploit. The 2020–2024 period in North Carolina saw major economic disruption that coincides with rising crime across multiple categories.
Why are elderly people increasingly targeted for fraud?
Several factors converge to make older adults disproportionately vulnerable to fraud. These include potential cognitive changes that affect judgment, social isolation that reduces informal protective relationships, fixed incomes that create anxiety about financial security, and accumulated savings that make them attractive targets. The NC DPS report documents a significant shift in fraud victimization rates toward those 65 and older between 2020 and 2024.
How do relationship problems contribute to white-collar crime trends?
Relational fracture matters in two important ways. First, community disconnection weakens the informal accountability systems that deter unethical behavior — people with strong social bonds are less likely to embezzle or commit fraud because those bonds create both moral anchors and practical deterrents. Second, many extortion schemes — particularly those targeting young people — are built on digital relationships where trust is extended too quickly and then exploited. Social isolation also leaves potential victims without trusted voices to help them identify suspicious contacts.
What does the NC DPS report say about white-collar crime trends from 2020 to 2024?
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety report shows extortion increasing by approximately 108 percent, fraud and embezzlement each rising by roughly 10 percent, and counterfeiting declining by about 11 percent. The report also documents a demographic shift in fraud victimization toward older adults, a surge in extortion targeting young males peaking in 2023, and a subsequent rise in extortion victimizations among older adults beginning in late 2024.
What can organizations do to reduce the risk of embezzlement from within?
The research on occupational fraud consistently points to three categories of intervention: strong internal controls that reduce opportunity, genuine attention to the financial and personal wellbeing of employees to address pressure, and a culture where reporting concerns is safe and encouraged. Internal audit functions, surprise reviews, and rotation of financial responsibilities are practical tools. But perhaps most importantly, organizations should ask whether they are creating the kind of pressure — through compensation gaps, unrealistic expectations, or lack of support — that makes the trifecta of financial need, health stress, and relational strain more likely to occur among their workforce.
CTA Bridge
Understanding why white-collar crime rises is not an academic exercise. It is the foundation of building organizations, families, and communities that are genuinely resistant to it. Chuck Gallagher has spent decades helping organizations confront the human side of ethical risk — the pressures, the rationalizations, and the cultural conditions that allow bad choices to compound into serious harm. If you are ready to have that conversation inside your organization, the starting point is ChuckGallagher.com.
Five Questions
1. The report documents that extortion more than doubled in North Carolina between 2020 and 2024 — a period that also included a pandemic, record inflation, and widespread social disruption. To what extent do you think economic and social instability, rather than individual moral failure, drives increases in white-collar crime? Where does accountability sit?
2. The fraud victimization rate among adults 65 and older rose substantially between 2020 and 2024. What specific responsibilities do adult children, financial advisors, and community institutions have in protecting older adults — and where does protection end and paternalism begin?
3. Embezzlement is overwhelmingly committed against organizations by people who work within them. What cultural conditions inside an organization — beyond inadequate controls — make this kind of ongoing internal fraud possible? What does it say about trust, pressure, and belonging when an employee steals quietly for months or years?
4. The trifecta model suggests that financial need, health vulnerability, and relational fracture often converge to produce both perpetrators and victims of white-collar crime. If this is true, what does it imply about the limitations of purely punitive responses to this type of crime? What would a more complete societal response look like?
5. Young men under 30 were the primary target of the extortion surge captured in this report, with many cases involving digital relationships and compromising material. What does this pattern reveal about how young people are building trust and intimacy in online environments, and what should parents, educators, and platforms do differently?
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