Typical Ways of Committing Crimes Related to the Construction and Operation of Apartment Buildings

Abstract

Crimes in the sphere of housing can be divided into two groups: those committed at the stage of construction and those committed at the stage of building management. Crimes at the stage of construction are most often connected with unscrupulous developers who have accumulated money for equity construction and then have failed to build the house or put it into commission, which could be characterized as fraud. There are many crimes connected with the overestimation of construction costs, provision of false work completion statements, etc. Crimes of unscrupulous management companies in the sphere of building maintenance are most often connected with embezzlement of funds collected from the dwellers as payments for utilities, and their non-transfer to the corresponding public utility companies. Besides, both management and construction companies often try to overestimate their costs by providing fictitious completion statements for the volume of work that has not been done, which could be viewed as the falsification of primary evidence. The sophisticated illegal schemes used by companies involved in the construction and management of apartment buildings result in a steady increase of the number of complaints from dwellers and equity construction participants, which leads to an increased burden on the specially authorized bodies who examine crimes in this sphere. The goal of this article is to systematize different ways of committing crimes in the sphere of housing and to improve the efficiency of their solving, investigation and prevention.