The online-offline nexus in cybercrime: Examining online and offline pathways into and out of cybercrime

ongoing

Cybercrime is on the rise and the digitization of crime raises an array of fundamental questions. The CybercrimePathways Programme focuses on one of the major issues in criminology today: changing offline and online pathways in and out of cybercrime. Individuals do not become cybercriminals overnight. They tend to move through different stages, with each stage bringing them a little closer to crime involvement. The opposite is true for desistance, the process of quitting crime, whereby each step takes individuals further away from criminal activities. Together, these stages are called pathways. The overarching aim of this study is to acquire fundamental knowledge on pathways into and out of cybercrime. Without knowledge about the pathways, it remains unclear if existing theories can still be used to explain cybercriminal activities. A recent systematic review of the literature shows that the empirical evidence on the factors leading into cybercrime is often incomplete, weak, and fragmented, and that there is a gap between insights from qualitative studies and quantitative studies on the potential drivers of recruitment. The Programme will go beyond the existing literature and propose a mixed method design that combines much-needed explorative qualitative insights with rigorous quantitative field experiments. Using unique qualitative data (a combination of interviews with criminal and ethical hackers, and police data), mechanisms will be distilled and experimented in studies with rigorous experimental designs. Criminological research using online platforms is scarce; however, the pioneering work conducted by both my colleagues and me confirms that these platforms are most promising for performing experimental studies. To reconceptualize and future-proof traditional theories, the Programme will study both cyber-dependent and cyber-enabled crimes, which will enable us to identify the similarities and differences between those two types of cybercrime.