Violating trust: a study of court verdicts in cases of gambling-driven economic crimes in the workplace

ABSTRACT

This study investigated trust-violating economic crimes committed in businesses and at public and non-profit organizations by employees with problem gambling. Verdicts delivered by the Swedish general courts over a five-year period (N = 283,884) were subject to a keyword search, and verdicts matching the search criteria (n = 1,232) were examined in detail, identifying 62 such cases. A notable finding was that middle-aged women with no previous criminal record were overrepresented compared with women in national statistics on crimes in general. Non-profit organizations and public services were relatively ineffective in detecting gambling-driven trust-violating crimes. The implications of our findings for criminological theory are discussed; the results lend support to Donald Cressey’s theory of trust-violating crime as driven by a non-shareable problem and agree with the ‘fraud triangle’ conceptualization. We conclude that although these gambling-driven crimes are relatively rare, the risk of them occurring should not be ignored by businesses and organizations as the consequences can be severe and, for small businesses, sometimes devastating.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• problem gambling
• workplace
• gender
• embezzlement
• fraud

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Constraints on publishing

There were no constraints on publishing.

Ethical approval

The Ethical Review Board in Stockholm Protocol number: 2018/2021-31/5

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided within the frame of the programme grant ‘Responding to and Reducing Gambling Problems – Studies in Help-seeking, Measurement, Comorbidity and Policy Impacts’ (REGAPS) financed by the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte), grant number 2016-07091