ABSTRACT
Most fraudsters and embezzlers have much more limited ambitions. More often than one might think, one is struck by the modesty, rather than the immensity, of the ambition displayed by many financial criminals. Overwhelmed by circumstances, their class background, employment history and modi operandi make it difficult to think of them as white-collar criminals in any commonly accepted sense of the term. It has been suggested that a possible solution to the conceptual and evidential difficulties involved in such an assessment might be provided by using the ways in which fraudsters and embezzlers spend their ill-gotten gains as an indication of the motivation that encouraged them to turn to crime in the first place. In the case of Jesse Varley, it has been shown that this methodology leads to the conclusion that he was motivated, as he had been earlier in his life, by a desire for respectability, standing and status.
