Journal of Financial Crime

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic approach to classify financial crime into main categories as well as sub categories.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature review, the main four categories were labeled corruption, fraud, theft, and manipulation, respectively.

Findings – There is a massive variety of crime types and crime names in the literature that can successfully be allocated to main categories of financial crime.

Research limitations/implications – The paper is based on exploratory research to stimulate future research in refining and improving the categories suggested here.

Practical implications – The great variety of criminal activities is classified in this paper so that practitioners can organize their thinking around crime themes rather than crime examples when mapping crime.

Social implications – The public and society at large will be able to understand the confusing variety of financial crime in terms of main categories.

Originality/value – There has been some confusion among both researchers and practitioners when communicating about examples of financial crime. The organizing framework in this paper will help allocate crime examples to main categories of financial crime.