Financial fraud allegations can happen to anyone that has a job in the financial, banking, investing, credit and sales, generally. Realistically, if you have access to the personal information of customers, like credit cards, bank accounts, Social Security Numbers, etc., you could face them too.
Identity theft
If you have access to customer information, you could be accused of identity theft. For example, if you work for a bank and cash a check for someone, and then someone else uses that person’s bank account to open other accounts, then you could face identity theft and other charges. Since you were part of the transaction, you could face allegations and, possibly serious criminal charges.
Sales and mass marketing
If you use the telephone, USPS or sell across state lines, you could face federal white collar criminal charges because you used instrumentalities of interstate commerce. Even if you did not lie, intentionally embellish or know you sold fraudulent items or investments, you could face charges.
Remember, prosecutors often over charge people and charge more people than necessary to get people to testify and make deals to ensure their prosecutions are much easier. This, often, means innocent people are caught up.
Pump and dump schemes
You could face charges for just communicating on the Internet too. With the rise in new digital platforms for trading, pump and dump schemes have become part of the news cycle again.
In these schemes, stock trader or brokers purchase cheap stock, hype them to investors to get them to buy the stock (the pump), which increases the value, and then, they sell (dump) the stock, which significantly lowers the cost of the stock, hurting all of the other investors that bought during the pump.
What to remember
The key for our readers is that, just because you are accused or charged with some kind of financial fraud, it does not mean that you did anything illegal or wrong. It just means that someone thinks that you did, and the burden is on them to prove it. Though, to ensure you the best chance to not see a conviction, contacting a Texas attorney is a good idea.