Fraud is another way of referring to malicious or trickery behavior that one person or entity uses to gain a dishonest advantage over the other. So, financial fraud means that one individual, otherwise known as the fraudster, dupes another and gains some monetary advantage over the victim.

In California, for one, you will notice that people never hesitate one bit when they realize that they can gain some monetary advantage at the expense of some unaware individual. They will violate any rule there is regarding fraud at any time and day. These financial fraud cases are usually more prevalent among family members or someone related to the fraudster in a significant way. Engaging in acts that dupe another victim, which can end up injuring or harming him can also be considered fraud in California.

Fraudulent acts are usually driven by two motives and the first and most common motive is usually the financial gain aspect of it all. The second motive is when the fraudster is looking to try and escape some criminal activity of some kind and with those two in mind, you can ascertain that there are quite a number of fraudulent acts that require the attention of the laws in California. When you do enough study in this field, you will notice that even though most of these fraudulent acts may be based mostly on these two motivators, some are completely different and are not even linked to the said motivations.

Laws and penalties

In California, these fraudulent crimes are referred to as the “white collar crimes.” Any case concerning fraud is usually a very serious offense and need to be handled with care. In most cases, the fraudsters are usually subjected to very harsh fines or a substantial number of years in their prison sentences.

Fraud-related crimes always carry different and specific penalties for them. In fact, many of the fraudulent acts committed in California, called the California Wobbler offenses, are a short way of saying that they will all be charged using the California theft laws in relation to the perpetrator’s felony offenses or misdemeanors.

The degree of sentencing you are going to receive in regards to your fraud case depends a lot more on your criminal records and history and the facts that have been presented in the case. California also regards some types of fraud cases as automatic felonies like cyber fraud which are under the federal crimes department. If found guilty of such a fraud case, you stand a chance of being prosecuted in state or federal law courts and this will only subject you to even higher penalties than with the lower cases.

Fraud defense

Most of the time you find that many of the attorneys of the defense teams using serious legal defenses in an attempt to try and have the initial penalties that the defendant is expected to pay to be lowered. Most of them use defense strategies that many of the attorneys in the defense teams usually use is the matter of intent of the defendant. If the attorney can be able to prove that the defendant never really had any intentions of defrauding anyone, then the charges can be significantly dropped, and in some rare cases maybe even dismissed.

Do you have a question about financial fraud laws in California? Click here to contact Von Esch Law today!