On 28th September 2022, we welcomed Steve van de Weijer to our Digital Trust and Security Seminar Series and we explored the life-course and offending trajectories of cybercrime offenders.
In our increasingly digitised society, new opportunities have emerged for offenders to commit cybercrimes. Official statistics and victimisation surveys show that victimisation rates of various types of cybercrimes rapidly increased during this century and these offences are now among the most prevalent types of crime in Western countries.
These developments have raised important questions for criminologists, some of which remain unanswered despite the profound debate. Should we consider cybercrime as a new type of crime or as ‘old wine in new bottles’? Are existing criminological theories, and findings on the causes, correlates, and consequences of traditional crimes, generalisable to cybercrime, or do we need new theories for this new type of crime?
In his presentation, Steve van de Weijer focused on these questions and presented his research on correlates, consequences, and longitudinal patterns of cybercrime offending. First, studies were discussed in which official register data from Statistics Netherland was used to examine differences in the intellectual capabilities and the criminal behavior of family members of cybercriminals, traditional criminals, and non-offenders. Second, the results of a field experiment were presented in which the labour market opportunities of convicted cybercrime offenders were examined. Third, research on the heterogeneity in offending patters of hackers, using millions of self-reported web defacements, was discussed.
You can rewatch the seminar below:
If you are interested in joining future events you can sign up for our DTS mailing list and follow our Twitter account @UoM_CDTS. The University of Manchester's wider Digital Futures network is highly interdisciplinary and operates across the whole range of the University’s digital research - connect with us and keep in touch: