Crowdsourcing Online Fraud Prevention: Empowering Victims through a Mutual Help Platform

• In Event: Advances in Cybervictimization Research

Abstract

While cybercrime now represents close to 50% of all criminal incidents, the resources deployed by law enforcement and justice agencies to support the victims of online harms remain grossly inadequate. The scale at which interventions are required exceeds these agencies’ operational framework and capacities. One alternative is to leverage the features of digital platforms to enable people who have been victimized or just avoided victimization to help current or potential victims through prevention tips and support messages. In this presentation, we introduce and discuss such an initiative, a Canadian cybercrime prevention platform named Fraude-alerte.ca, which has helped 350,000 people over a year (4.3% of the local population) and provides searchable information on more than 7,000 online fraud incidents. We use platform and Google analytics to demonstrate the volume and nature of online fraud prevention activities enabled by the platform, and show how these analytics can help track cybercrime trends in near-real time. We also discuss how the digitalization of cybercrime prevention can support victims’ empowerment and help them mitigate the aftermath of adverse events at a scale that conventional criminal justice interventions can’t match.

Authors

• Benoît Dupont, Université de Montréal

• Fyscillia Ream, Université de Montréal

• Akim Laniel-Lanani, Université de Montréal