Peter Grupe is a busy man. He’s the special agent in charge of white-collar crime cases for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York field office, the bureau’s largest. In October his unit arrested Galleon Group hedge fund operator Raj Rajaratnam and others in what authorities allege was one of the biggest insider trading rings ever uncovered.
This week, the FBI nabbed its first target in a new arena of fraud: stealing from the government’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. New York prosecutors announced the arrest of former Park Avenue Bank Chief Executive Charles Antonucci Sr. on charges of lying on an application for $11 million in TARP funds. Bank regulators shut down Park Avenue Bank earlier this month.
And it was agents from the FBI’s New York field office who were there in December 2008 to arrest the hedge fund swindler Bernard Madoff, who’s serving a 150-year sentence in a North Carolina federal prison.
In Pictures: The New Financial Crime Wave
There’s no shortage of work for Grupe and his team. Mortgage fraud is on the rise, as are bogus job counseling services and frauds conducted over the Internet. Since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, the FBI’s 1,000-agent New York office has tripled its mortgage fraud investigations squad and beefed up its securities and financial fraud group.
Grupe says his team is trying to detect frauds earlier by making use of the resources of the FBI’s intelligence group, with a particular focus on cyber crimes. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center says it received 336,655 fraud complaints last year related to financial losses of $560 million, double the dollar amount reported the year before. “With the sophistication in technology you’re going to see more sophisticated crimes,” Grupe said in a recent interview.
Read the original article at: http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/19/fraud-mortgage-work-at-home-business-financial-crimes.html?boxes=financechannelforbes