Two of the main forms of financial crime are:
One risk for short sellers or journalists or other sorts of investigators looking into a financial fraud is mistaking Thing 2, money laundering, for Thing 1, regular financial fraud. Thing 1 is more tractable, to the average sort of financial person. Thing 1 is a crime of spreadsheets: The criminal act consists of writing a spreadsheet with fake numbers in it and getting your auditors to believe it. Thing 2 is a crime of, you know, crime; the people doing that crime have also done the underlying crime that they are concealing, or at least they work for people who did it. Often that underlying crime took place in physical reality rather than spreadsheets, and the people who do it are scarier than people who mainly manipulate spreadsheets.