Racketeering, Loan Sharking and Organized Financial Crime

Offenses that criminalize an ongoing illegal financial enterprise or an exploitative lending relationship, most often associated with organized crime, rather than a single fraudulent transaction or false representation. This group gathers racketeering, the offense of participating in an ongoing criminal enterprise through a pattern of related illegal acts prosecuted as a coordinated whole; loan sharking, exploitative lending enforced through extralegal and often violent collection rather than the civil courts; and usury, the underlying offense of lending at an interest rate a jurisdiction's law forbids, which loan sharking typically compounds with coercive collection. It excludes an ordinary fraudulent scheme run by an individual or a business without the sustained criminal-enterprise structure racketeering statutes specifically target, which belongs under one of this subcategory's other groups according to its own method.