Financial criminals are still one step ahead of the authorities, according to a criminal lawyer, who argues it will be impossible to eradicate economic crime completely despite increased scrutiny of the financial industry.
White collar crime is estimated to cost the global economy more than $2 trillion a year, according to the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – with the cost to the U.K. alone at more than £40 billion ($61.9 billion) a year.
The types of crime range from fraud and bribery to insider trading and embezzlement, experts told CNBC, and cybercrime is increasingly becoming part of its evolution.
(Read more: Cybercrime threat? 'You ain't seen nothing yet')
"We're seeing much more sophisticated criminals around the globe now and we're seeing technology playing a big part in that," Aaron Stephens, financial crime partner at law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, said.
"We're still in a period of flux when it comes to cybercrime and there's still a lot of scope for the criminals to be one step ahead of the authorities and more needs to be done in that regard."
Michael Levi, professor of criminology at Cardiff University, agreed that cybercrime was one of the biggest challenges facing regulators, and added that accounting fraud was also an "endemic problem."
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"The biggest white collar crimes are really the big accounting fraud risks," he told CNBC.
