Judge Rakoff also offered–relevant to some of the work that I have done and am doing on friends-and-family insider trading cases–that based on his personal experience, fraud and other white collar criminal misconduct may be motivated by greed, a desire for power or status, psychological issues, etc. But he noted overall that those who commit business fraud have a well-founded belief that they can get away with their misconduct–and they actually do. These fraudsters get off the hook, he says, in part because of a prosecutorial double standard that jails some and not others and also because of an enforcement shift from a large number of individual white collar prosecutions in the early part of the new millennium to legal actions taken against the business entities that employ the actors committing the fraudulent activity.
Source: Judge Jed Rakoff on Fraud and Fraudsters – Business Law Prof Blog
