Drifting on and off-line: humanising the cyber criminal
2013
Technological change represents one of the clearest areas in which criminology has had to work hard to keep-up. In this chapter Webber and Yip provide a cutting edge analysis of a particular kind of cybercrime, carding, and use online forums as a means of investigating the mechanisms and culture of hackers working in this illicit economy. Using this data they develop ideas taken from criminological theory to suggest that hackers operate within disorganised fields in which association with others allows hackers to learn how to operate effectively. In contrast to the sterility of much web crime analysis the authors use their data to highlight some of the more complex aspects of hacker identity and the conflicts that sometimes emerge around the relative morality of their actions.