The numbers are all over the place. The white-collar offenses include things like credit card theft, money laundering and counterfeiting, all things that also exist in street crime. It also include intellectual property theft/piracy, and at that point we can basically just make up any number we want.<p>Another strange aspect to those numbers is when I look up the cost of crime in general. Most of the total numbers I find cites trillions. Remove street crime and white-collar crime, and there is trillions still left unaccounted for.<p>There is also a lot of uncertainty in how they determine the number for white-collar crime. Looking at studies there are multiple angles, with one study splitting it into:<p><pre><code> Victim costs
Criminal justice system costs
Crime career costs (criminal’s choice to engage in illegal rather than legal)
Intangible costs (Indirect losses suffered by crime victims)
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Based on that it is very difficult to compare a crime like insider trading with assault, since how you determine each of those categories is going to significant change the numbers. Drug crime for example has very high or very low cost to society depending on how one count, primarily because criminal justice system costs and crime career costs are both high while the others are fairly low or non-existent (depending on political views).