SM5051 Crime and the Media Essay: Cybercrime Analysis

This essay delves into the multifaceted realm of cybercrime, exploring its various forms and the profound impact it has on individuals and society. It examines how technological advancements, including the internet and smartphones, have created new opportunities for criminal activities such as fraud, theft, and intimidation. The essay highlights the challenges researchers face in understanding the nature and extent of cybercrime, particularly the limitations of traditional crime theories in this digital context. It discusses the difficulties in gathering reliable statistics, the elusive nature of cybercriminals, and the need for effective legislation and global cooperation to combat cybercrime. Furthermore, the essay explores the complexities of investigating cybercrimes, the lack of physical evidence, and the evolving tactics employed by cybercriminals. It also addresses the critical need for awareness and education to mitigate the risks associated with cybercrime and protect individuals and businesses from its detrimental effects.

Crime and the Media

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................3
REFERNCES...................................................................................................................................3

INTRODUCTION
Cybercrime is the popular crime making the use of digital platform to conduct illegal
activities. These cyber-attacks are causing adverse impact in the lives of people. Cybercrimes are
not limited to individual but disrupting businesses too. Although, the General Data Protection
Regulation is likely to regulate these activities but is not enough for the evolving forms of
cybercrimes. New technologies devise new opportunities for crimes and thus, causes global
threat. The internet offers hiding places for the criminals as well the provide network to hide.
There are various forms of cybercrimes and even categorised differently. Because of these
characteristics cybercrimes are considered as real world crimes and need to prosecute
accordingly (Furnell and et. al., 2020).
The cybercrime is already a serious concern for the law enforcement agencies, policy
makers, the government and other professionals. Furthermore, there no sign of reducing
cybercrimes. The essay examines how and what types of crimes take place with the usage of
computer technology and its impact on society as well as on the individuals. The essay highlights
the key problems which are faced by researchers in studying the nature as well as extent of
cybercrimes. The theories related to traditional crimes cannot be related to cybercrimes. The
essay provides the all the problems of researchers in identifying and knowing characteristics of
cybercrimes. The researchers aims to provide motive and methods behind cybercrime and while
researching they faced various challenges.
MAIN BODY
The pace of technology participated in revolutionizing each aspect of human life from
communicating, banking to fulfilling our needs. The source of internet and evolving forms of
technology including smart phones, gadgets led to the advancement and quality of higher life.
The advancement in the technology have also contributed in creating countless opportunities for
offenders to commit various forms of crime. Cybercrime is form of online crime and it occurs
when preparatory makes wrongful use of technology or online network to commit crimes such as
abuse, fraud, theft, threats or intimidation (Rajput, 2020). They led to computer assisted crime as
the technology and computer are used to support such crimes i.e. computer is used to send threat
messages. On the other hand, the cybercrime encompasses computer- focused crimes, these are
crimes occurred as a result of direct usage of computer technology such as trespassing someone’s

computer system, hacking and so forth. Cybercrimes are classified into variety of categories as a
result it becomes impossible to estimate such forms of crime. The lack of proper definition of
legal crimes and knowledge for these offenses accompanied by few reliable statistics led to
cybercrimes across nations. However, while traditional forms of crimes on street are decreasing,
the rates of cybercrimes are increasing especially amid pandemic situation (Wiggen, 2020).
Over the previous few decades, the research on cybercrime has grown. Early research is
devoted in order to determine how the cybercrime and cyberspace are varied from the traditional
crime and terrestrial space. It caused significant challenge for the researchers in studying the
nature and extent of cybercrime with lack of official statistics in determining the forms of
cybercrimes. Researchers were particularly interested on seeing whether the theories such as
general theory of crime and others used to determine traditional crimes could be applied to
different types of cybercrimes. As a result, researchers started collecting the key aspects of such
traditional theories along with primary data. While studying the nature and extent of cybercrime
researchers examined the simpler forms of cybercrimes which includes harassing texts, threats
rather than complex forms in which technical skills are required to commit such crimes. The
primary data collections causes hurdles for cybercrime researchers. They faced challenges as
they describe that the state statute could be more appropriate in regulating forms of cybercrimes.
The research in respect of the cybercrime must be key aspect for policy makers and other
professionals to regulate and prevent various forms of cybercrimes. But unfortunately, there is
lack of studies in respect of the effectiveness of cybercrime policies. Furthermore, it became
difficult for the researchers to determine these cybercrimes because unlike traditional crime they
are not committed to only one geographical location. Effective global response required to
reduce cybercrime rates. There are large number of issues which are causing hindrances in the
path of reducing cybercrime rates. Some of the major problems are the shortcomings of the
effective legislations, technology to monitor and cyber criminology. The environment of
cybercrime is not similar to traditional crime as the internet is ‘anti- spatial’ (Noble, 2021).
Thus, evaluating the location along with characteristics is impossible in case of cybercrimes.
Criminology helps to understand the motive behind a crime by analysing the social
characteristics of the criminal. It helps to understand the reasons behind the crimes committed by
the people with particular traits. The characteristics of people for evaluating traditional crimes
cannot be true in case of cybercrimes. The current theories and social exclusions have are not

relevant and cannot be relied upon in understanding the motives behind cybercrimes. It makes it
difficult not only for researchers but also for enforcement agencies and government to take
corrective measures to tackle and reduce such forms of cybercrimes. Furthermore, as per the
agencies of the] UK law enforcement, any such crime involving the computer technology is
bifurcated under three categories. Firstly, criminal activity can be committed through directly the
computer such as laptop or gadget is stolen. Secondly, when the computer technology is used as
a medium to support cybercrime against an individual or business, such as hacking the bank
account of an individual or steal any private document of business. Thirdly, when the computer
acts as intermediate to facilitate crime such as when the criminals make use of computer
technology for knowing activities which are related to crime for example doing research in
respect of any crime (Guerra and Ingram, 2020). Thus, the computer technology acts as an
intermediary between offenders and their victims, and influencing how an offence is planned and
be carried out. Therefore, the new technology prompts the community of the behavioural
standards in respect of the technology and it is important how these standards should be reflected
in the legislations in order to tackle and reduce such crimes.
The researchers mostly use virtual communities and social network data in order to better
understand the evolving trends of cybercrimes. They even uses variety of qualitative and
quantitative research methods which includes, data available on social media, online content,
questionnaires so as to determine the basic characteristics in respect of various forms of
cybercrimes. One of the major challenge faced by researchers in analysing the nature of
cybercrime is lack of appropriate law to tackle the offenders of the cybercrimes. The
enforcement of law in respect to cybercrime is less as compared to legislation for other
traditional crimes (Brett, Wood and Parker, 2020). Because of lack of law enforcement, evolving
forms of cybercrimes devises new challengers in front of law makers and other professional
agencies. Awareness of various forms of cybercrimes are necessary for progressing United
Kingdom in the pace of technology.
As the cyberspace is elusive which makes it difficult for the researchers to undertake the
study of offenders. Finding hackers is like finding needle in a pile of garbage. Further the
characteristics of these offenders are impossible to trace such as hackers take more risk as
compared to other offenders. The traditional theories and criminology lack in bridging the gap in
the areas of cybercrimes. For researchers it is difficult to analyse such behaviour of cyber

offenders with some theories related to other crimes. Due to internet’s uniqueness one cannot
identify the online environment and characteristics of the cybercrimes easily.
The huge number of communication and e-commerce conducted over the internet is legal
and lawful. However there has been increase in number of utilizing the internet to instigate and
favour fraudulent schemes (Holt and et. al., 2020). Just like previous technological and technical
advances have led drastic improvisations for society, they also have generated some new
opportunities for wrongdoer. There are many challenges which law and enforcement authorities
are facing while addressing cybercrime and understanding the nature of cybercrime the starting
stages of any cybercrime investigation entail a higher number of uncertainty. Most of the time it
is difficult to quickly identify and to understand what type of crime has been committed over the
internet or using the internet (Sinai, 2020). For example when any investigation authority gets
receives any complaint regarding any company’s data being hacked or used by any unknown
person through internet, then it becomes difficult for the investigation authority to identify the
main reason or motive of that unknown intruder of the company’s database.
The motive behind such huge intrusion could be anything likely to sabotage the
company’s data, cyber-attack or stealing company’s important data to provide it other company
or use it for own gain. Likewise if any person or group of persons enters the bank with gun for
the purpose of bank robbery and demands money it is clear for all that what type of crime is
being committed. Even in that case there are numbers of evidence which can be collected to
catch such criminals i.e. fingerprints, CCTV footage, shoe impressions, several witnesses,
photographs etc. However none of these available while conducting the investigation of
cybercrime, there are hardly any evidence other than the IP address of the source setup. And
there are many other cybercrimes which are going on daily and these are impacting a huge
number of society, for example cyber fraud by fraud messages, mails, calls etc.
There are many key problems which cybercrime researchers face while studying and
understating the nature and extent of cybercrime (Xu and et. al., 2020). To identify quickly and
investigate this elusive and shifty nature of cybercrime demands a need of high level of expertise
and research over the cybercrime in the technological revolutionary era. There are several cases
where investigation agencies get confused while understanding the reason behind any Computer
database intrusion. There are no boundaries set for the cybercriminals to fraud people over the
internet, so it becomes difficult to know the full extent of any fraud being committed by and

cybercriminal to anyone. There are many victims of the cybercrime who never reports the crime
by any reason that somehow leads to encouragement to the cybercriminals for committing more
cybercrimes. And this is where researchers face to identify the nature of crime and to what extent
it is being committed (Deighton and Wakefield, 2020). For Example in today’s era
cybercriminals are coming up with new cybercrime and fraudulent schemes over internet to rook
innocent people and to understand the nature of new forms and schemes of internet fraud these
researchers need more data to analyse such crimes and for that analyses victims of such internet
fraud are required to report such crimes as soon as possible so that other innocent people can be
saved by researching the data and making others aware of such crimes by releasing advisory
(Avery, 2020).
There is another problem which these researchers face while studying the nature and
extent of cybercrime is that internet provides numbers of information of many people around the
world and that helps cybercriminals to target their new victim easily and in many cases the
victim of any cybercrime never talks or meet the fraudster, these people get deceived by phone
calls or mails and messages only and victims trust these fraudster easily. And because of this
negligence of the victims researchers never get enough data understand the nature and extent of
such cybercrime. There is another main problem for researchers is that all of these cybercrimes
being committed through the source computer or device of their end and before any victim
makeup his mind to file complaint of such crime these cybercriminals can easily delete of
manipulate data after committing crime and they never get caught.
There was a time when data used to be stored in paper files and there were less chances to
get these files and now these data are being stored in digital form on many devices i.e hard
drives, various networks, cell phones, computer etc. which can easily be manipulated if that
device has internet access, one wrong mail or message can hack these devices. Many times all
these information are being shared to each other through various internet platforms and that is
where it gets manipulated or stole by fraudsters (Davison, 2021). So cybercrime researchers face
a huge problem here that they don’t know who will be cybercriminal’s next victim and what
platform they will use to fraud people.
Foreign cybercriminals committing cybercrimes in various countries are also main problem
for researchers to study the nature and extent of any cybercrime because it is kind of impossible
to get data of such crimes from another country and analyse these. And even after getting such

data it is nearly impossible to track down the fraudster because technical and technological
guidelines various country to country and till the time the researchers get through the data the
foreign cybercriminals manipulate the data from their end and runaway (Weulen Kranenbarg,
2020). In catching foreign cybercriminals there is also a main problem which is language barrier,
the cyber expert researchers need to understand the native language of the foreign cybercriminal
which he might have used while committing he cybercrime. In many cases cyber expert
researchers fails here because they don’t understand the language of the communication of the
foreign cybercriminal and the person who understands the language does not know the technical
language of the cybercrime. Till the time the experts decodes both the foreign cybercriminals
easily manipulate or delete the data and start working on their new victim and this process goes
on and it becomes difficult to catch such foreign cybercriminals (Chung, 2020).
CONCLUSION
The above essay concludes the various challenges the researchers faced while studying the
nature and extent of the cybercrime. The essay defined the meaning of cybercrime. The essay
aims to identify gaps between the traditional crimes and cybercrimes. The researchers faced
difficulties because of lack of law enforcement as well as they are unable to identify the
particular characteristics of criminals leading to cybercrimes. As the theories of traditional
crimes are not similar in case of various forms of cybercrimes. Furthermore, the pace of
technology led the distinguish characteristics for these crimes. The cybercrime rates is more as
compared to traditional crimes. The researchers find difficult to trace the motive of criminal
behind cybercrime. The evolving forms of cybercrimes somehow fading the role of General Data
Protection Regulation as the punishment seems ineffective for such forms of cybercrimes. Thus,
the essay effectively examined the problems faced by the researchers in acknowledging the
cybercrimes.

REFERNCES
Books and Journals
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