ABSTRACT
11.1 Historically, bank fraud in the United States was of peripheral interest to bank regulators and lawyers, being confined largely to limited cases of bank embezzlement and theft. However, with the era of internationalisation and deregulation of banking and financial services (which era continues today), when combined with major banking institution failures in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, issues of bank fraud have taken an increasingly heightened and broadened dimensions on both the criminal and civil levels. 1 In addition, as evidenced by other Chapters in this volume, such interests also generate global implications (e.g., Chapters 9 and 10 on money laundering and Chapter 13 on financial sector corruption) and technological implications (e.g., Chapter 14 on cyberfraud). Further, as discussed in Chapter 8, the banking institutions themselves are required to take an active institutional management role in trying to limit fraud against banks by external parties, fraud involving bank personnel, and fraud contributed to (directly or indirectly) by the banking institution itself. This Chapter will limit itself to considering how regulatory interest in the US significantly expanded from the mid-1980s.
