Cybercrime vs. Traditional Crime: an Empirical Comparison of Offenders

• In Event: The Human Factor in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity

Abstract

The digital context in which computer-dependent cybercrimes take place, can change the processes that lead to criminal offending. For these crimes, no physical convergence of victims and offenders is required. Online behavior is less visible and offenders can easily hide their offending from the offline ‘real’ world. The chances of getting caught are very low. Conventional daily activities that normally reduce criminal offending, could now increase opportunities for cybercrime offending. All these differences can lower the threshold for committing a crime online and could therefore change who will commit a crime. In addition, for most computer-dependent cybercrimes a certain amount of skills and patience is needed to commit these crimes.
This seems to indicate that traditional explanations of criminal offending might not be equally applicable to cybercrime. Nevertheless, research in criminology has shown that, despite these differences, several theories are useful to understand cybercrime offending as well. However, these studies have not been able to empirically test if these explanations have the same explanatory power for cybercrime offending as they have for traditional offending.
This presentation will give an overview of the results of a comparative study of cybercrime offending and traditional offending. It includes both life-course research on a criminal population study based on longitudinal registration data and results based on a cross-sectional self-report survey of a high risk sample of Dutch cybercrime and traditional suspects (N=535). Results on different types of cybercrime offending, risk factors, personal social networks and the victim-offender overlap will be discussed.

Author

• Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg, NSCR (Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement)