What Is Cybercrime?
Cybercrime is a crime that involves the use of computer networks to commit offences. The internet’s speed, convenience and anonymity have enabled new crime types to emerge that are not possible in other settings, such as money laundering, fraudulent consumer transactions, the sale of illicit drugs or a number of forms of identity theft. Moreover, cybercrime activities can be committed by a wide range of individuals, from those with limited technical skills to highly organized global criminal groups.
The variety of classification systems currently used by practitioners and researchers suggests that there is no common understanding of what constitutes a cybercrime. This variation can be attributed to different disciplinary schools of thought and criminological perspectives, including social realist and constructivist theories of crime and delinquency.
For example, Wall’s early taxonomy [20] is weighted equally in relation to person-target and computer-target based offences; this contrasts with the COE’s Convention of Cybercrime [25] classification system which distinguishes between four distinct categories – see Table 4.
A further distinction that can be made is between content-based and transaction-based crimes. Those at one end of the spectrum commit crimes such as child sexual exploitation and abuse, digital piracy or cyber-enabled money laundering. These involve the manipulation of data for profit or political gain and can take advantage of the relative anonymity that the internet affords. At the other extreme are those who attack the actual functioning of the internet, such as spamming or hacking.