The term "white-collar crime" refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non-directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals. The crimes are believed to be committed by middle- or upper-class individuals for financial gains. It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation". Typical white-collar crimes could include wage theft, fraud, bribery, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, labor racketeering, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery. White-collar crime overlaps with corporate crime.

Modern criminology generally prefers to classify the type of crime and the topic:

Corporate crime benefits the corporation (company or other type of business organization), rather than individuals. It may, however, result from the decisions of high-ranking individuals within the corporation. Corporations are not, unlike individuals, litigated in criminal courts, which means the term "crime" does not really apply. Litigation usually takes place in civil courts or by institutions with jurisdiction over specific types of offences, such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission which litigates violations of financial market and investment statutes.

State-corporate crime is “illegal or socially injurious actions that occur when one or more institutions or political governance pursue a goal in direct cooperation with one or more institutions of economic production and distribution.” The negotiation of agreements between a state and a corporation will be at a relatively senior level on both sides, this is almost exclusively a white-collar "situation" which offers the opportunity for crime. Although law enforcement claims to have prioritized white-collar crime, evidence shows that it continues to be a low priority.

When senior levels of a corporation engage in criminal activity using the company this is sometimes called control fraud.

Organized transnational crime is organized criminal activity that takes place across national jurisdictions, and with advances in transportation and information technology, law enforcement officials and policymakers have needed to respond to this form of crime on a global scale. Some examples include human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling, illegal arms dealing, terrorism, and cybercrime. Although it is impossible to precisely gauge transnational crime, the Millennium Project, an international think tank, assembled statistics on several aspects of transnational crime in 2009:

When a white-collar criminal turns violent, it becomes red-collar crime. This can take the form of killing a witness in a fraud trial to silence them or murdering someone who exposed the fraud, such as a journalist, detective or whistleblower. Perri and Lichtenwald defined red-collar crime as follows:

“This sub-group is referred to as red-collar criminals because they straddle both the white-collar crime arena and, eventually, the violent crime arena. In circumstances where there is the threat of detection, red-collar criminals commit brutal acts of violence to silence the people who have detected their fraud and to prevent further disclosure.”