In criminology, corporate crime refers to crimes either committed by a corporation, i.e. a business entity having a separate legal personality from the natural persons that manage its activities, or by individuals that may be identified with a corporation or other business entity (see vicarious liability and corporate liability). This type of crime therefore overlaps with:

• white-collar crime because the majority of individuals who may act as or represent the interests of the corporation will be employees or professionals of a higher social class;
• organized crime because criminals can set up corporations either for the purposes of crime or as vehicles for laundering the proceeds of crime. Organized crime has become a branch of big business and is simply the illegal sector of capital. It has been estimated that, by the middle of the 1990s, the "gross criminal product" of organised crime made it the twentieth richest organisation in the world and richer than 150 sovereign states (Castells 1998: 169). The world’s gross criminal product has been estimated at 20 percent of world trade. (de Brie 2000); and
• state-corporate crime because, in many contexts, the opportunity to commit crime emerges from the relationship between the corporation and the state.