Do women have an edge when it comes to pulling off financial crime? Some research suggests that they do. It also suggests that while women are actually more likely than men to engage in financial crime, they are often the least suspected. The reason might stem from a powerful bias that women are largely “nice”, and usually trustworthy. In this episode we explore how this belief might have been at play in a 200 million dollar Ponzi scheme run by a Florida woman named Johanna Garcia.
It's a story about how Johanna pulled in thousands of investors by leaning on her persona as a community builder from humble beginnings. The belief in Johanna’s kind-heartedness was so strong, that even as she was under investigation, and their money was frozen, her investors refused to believe she was capable of such a crime.
We’re joined by our guest fraud expert, Kelly Paxton, a certified fraud examiner and expert on pink-collar crime – a term that describes theft from the workplace that's committed by low or mid level employees; roles that are typically held by women. However, pink-collar crime has evolved to encompass much more than embezzlement by women, and today it’s on the rise. Kelly explains how women can often more easily build trust and fly under the radar as they steal from clients or employers.
This is a fascinating dive into the phenomenon of pink-collar crime and how Johanna Garcia built her Ponzi scheme from her small time bookkeeping business to a country-wide investment scam. It’s an examination of the idea that when it comes to fraud, being a woman can be the perfect cover.