Public policing and Internet crime
Yvonne Jewkes · 2015
Global statistics, though unreliable, indicate that cybercrime is dramatically increasing in number and severity but that successful policing of the problem remains inadequate; indeed, it is estimated that still only 10 per cent of computer-related crime is reported and fewer than two per cent of cases result in a successful prosecution (www.intergov.org; see also discussion in Wall 2007: 17-20). The reasons for the under-reporting of cybercrime are complex, but there are two predominant explanations for its low visibility. First, there may be a failure on the part of some victims of cybercrime to recognise that a crime has taken place, or alternatively that an act to which they have been subjected is illegal. Offences may be carried out over a relatively long period of time before the victim realises that something is amiss and, in some cases, crimes and their perpetrators remain unknown and their effects are not felt. Thus, although the notion of any crimes being ‘victimless’ has been vigorously challenged, especially in the criminological literature on whitecollar crime, locating cyber-victimisation can be problematic because victims can remain as anonymous as offenders. Identifying victimisation is further problematised in cases of virus propagation because the numbers of victims affected may be simply too large and dispersed to identify, and because viruses can continue to create new victims long after the virus was generated and – hypothetically speaking, given the rarity of successful investigations and prosecutions – long after the offender has been caught and punished (Jewkes and Yar 2008). Interestingly, in the case of viruses, low-level victimisation can be extremely widespread as warnings are often issued before the virus is released, causing millions of computer users to change or modify their online activity. Usually described in apocalyptic terms (and frequently by companies selling anti-virus software), these programs may cause a degree of panic even when, as with the much-publicised Conficker virus unleashed on 1 April 2009, it is not immediately clear what damage it can do.