Embezzlement
theft of assets from one person or entity by another to whom the assets were entrusted
Embezzlement (from Anglo-Norman, from Old French besillier ("to torment, etc."), of unknown origin) is a type of financial crime, usually involving theft of money from a business or employer. It often involves a trusted individual taking advantage of their position to steal funds or assets, most commonly over a period of time.
Versus larceny
Embezzlement is not always a form of theft or an act of stealing per se, since those definitions specifically deal with taking something that does not belong to the perpetrators. Instead, embezzlement is, more generically, an act of deceitfully secreting assets by one or more persons that have been entrusted with such assets. The persons entrusted with such assets may or may not have an ownership stake in such assets.
Embezzlement differs from larceny in three ways. First, in embezzlement, an actual conversion must occur; second, the original taking must not be trespassory, and third, in penalties. To say that the taking was not trespassory is to say that the persons performing the embezzlement had the right to possess, use or access the assets in question, and that such persons subsequently secreted and converted the assets for an unintended or unsanctioned use. Conversion requires that the secretion interfere with the property, rather than just relocate it. As in larceny, the measure is not the gain to the embezzler, but the loss to the asset stakeholders.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Embezzlement” as theft of assets from one person or entity by another to whom the assets were entrusted. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as theft of assets from one person or entity by another to whom the assets were entrusted. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q157833. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Embezzlement” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.