The Dark Figure of Online Property Crime: Is Cyberspace Hiding a Crime Wave?

Abstract

A pronounced drop in crime, since the early 1990s, has encompassed every crime category tracked by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, including property crime. However, over the same period, the rates of online property crime (OPC) have been on the rise according to available evidence. We delineate the extent of our knowledge and data concerning cybercrime and identity theft and, using data from several nationally representative victimization surveys, offer an alternative view of property crime trends while pointing out the glaring gap in crime reporting and accounting in relation to the growing category of property crimes perpetrated online. In addition, we compare estimated costs of traditional property crime vs. OPC. Finally, we identify the main challenges for obtaining reliable data on OPC and discuss their implications, especially when applying the traditional methods of compiling crime statistics.

Keywords:

• online crime
• property crime
• cybercrime
• crime drop
• methods of counting crime

Acknowledgment

We gratefully acknowledge the huge role that meetings of the International Society on Life and Death Studies (ISOLADS) played in shaping this paper and forging the ideas underlying it. A preliminary version of the study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta, GA, in 2013. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and valuable suggestions during several rounds of reviews.

Notes

¹ We are grateful to one of our anonymous reviewers for raising several of the definitional points in this section.

² There is also a possibility that the need to create a record of a crime for insurance purposes will play an important role in biasing the types of crimes reported, though we note there is only limited evidence for the importance of insurance as an incentive to report crimes in other areas (Harlow, 1985; Hart & Rennison, 2003; Skogan, 1984).

³ It is important to underscore a critical difference in the ways the prevalence of OPC is measured in available sources. Whereas the NCVS measures the “number of victimizations” per 100 individuals aged 12+, the data do not account for whether the same or different individuals were victimized. As a result, the numbers do not actually tell us what percentage of individuals are affected by OPC, but only the rate at which victimization incidents occurred. The best estimates for the rates at which people are actually affected by OPC suggest it affects between 4.4 and 6.0% of the adult population annually (Javelin Strategy & Research, 2012), or between 5.5 and 7.3% of households nationally, according to NCVS data (Langton, 2011).

⁴ Interestingly, the US Department of Justice has a section on their web site titled “What Should I Do If I’ve Become a Victim of Identity Theft?” It advises victims to report their victimization to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and several other organizations (e.g. Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, and credit reporting companies) but reporting to the police is not included in that list. (http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/websites/idtheft.html, accessed 8/14/14).

⁵ In addition, over the years of data collection, fewer and fewer consumers answer the question about reporting their victimization to police (less than half of people reporting their victimizations to FTC provided an answer about reporting it to police in 2009, 2010, and 2011), thus further undermining the generalizability of FTC data.

⁶ As an example, based on a series of studies commissioned by Symantec and conducted by the Ponemon Institute (2012) where large US companies (over 2000 employees per company) were surveyed, the average financial loss from data breach incidents per year per company is estimated to be $8.9 million. However, this estimate cannot be easily translated into a national total because of the method by which the sample was drawn.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Tcherni

Maria Tcherni, PhD, is an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, CT. She holds a PhD from the University at Albany (SUNY). Her research interests include explaining crime trends and patterns, unraveling structural and biosocial causes of violence, and testing criminological theories. She published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

A. Davies

Andrew Lucas Blaize Davies, PhD, is a post-doctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Albany. His publications have appeared both in edited volumes and in journals including Law and Society Review, Studies in Law, Politics and Society, and the Albany Law Review. In his professional capacity, he oversees a program of regular data collection and research into the provision of legal services to indigent persons in New York State.

G. Lopes

Giza Lopes, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at the School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany. She is primarily interested in policy research of issues lying at the intersection of health and criminal justice, particularly the medicalization of society and attendant legal shifts.

A. Lizotte

Alan Lizotte, PhD, is a dean and professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany. He is co-principal investigator on the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS), a 26-year ongoing longitudinal study of juvenile delinquency and drug use covering three generations of subjects. His substantive interests include illegal firearms ownership and use and developmental criminology. In 2003, together with his RYDS coauthors, he was awarded the American Society of Criminology’s Hindelang Award for the book Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective.