ABSTRACT
This chapter examines offenders who have stepped forward to exploit one category of the new opportunities. Drawing from interviews with criminal telemarketers, it presents a picture and interpretation of them, their pursuits and their lifestyles. The description of telemarketing crime and criminals is noteworthy for several reasons, but principally for what it reveals about the relationship between social change and the changing character of lucrative professional theft. Defined by cultural criteria rather than legal yardsticks, the concept of professional crime has become infused with contradiction and ambiguity by the evolution of this new kind of 'respectable' predator. Unlike professional thieves, however, telemarketing criminals disproportionately are drawn from middle-class, entrepreneurial backgrounds. Like the markets that they seek to manipulate and plunder, the enacted environments of professional criminals embrace infinite variations, and are largely indistinguishable from the arenas that capacitate legitimate entrepreneurial pursuits.
