Cybercrime: threats, prevention, and policy frameworks

Cybercrime

Modern Scam:

A Summary of the Seven Most Threatening Scams of our Generation

Intended Audience

Cybercrime:

Cybercrime is a serious threat to continued use and reliance on the internet. From bank accounts, to e-mail addresses and a myriad of password, if one is not careful, identity theft, account break-in, and other such cybercrimes can happen very quickly, and with incredibly negative repercussions. This paper will aim to summarize the study "The Seven Scam Types: Mapping the Terrain of Cybercrime" by Amber Stabek, Paul Watters and Robert Layton at the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, and will also describe the purpose of the study, its intended audience, and the various details given for the reader, as well as terms and references.

Purpose of the Study

The paper's abstract starts by stating that the threat of cybercrime is a growing danger in today's economy. This is a strong statement, and clarifies the purpose of the paper which the reader can assume is to prove how this is so and what one can do in order to understand this issue better. The paper continues by stating that cybercrime is quite complex, and that it affects many industries and businesses, as well as individuals. However, since cybercrime is such a complex crime (it includes laundering, trafficking and terrorism), these criminals will often target those who can either pay more, or those in the public eye, where they will have most impact.

The study further states that there are various classifications for cybercrime. In order to cement its purpose, it offers the cybercrime classification framework (CCF). The CCF is definitely one of the primary purposes of the paper, as the objective is "to determine a classification system that can be used by various parties to refer to similar types of scams in the international cybercrime." This is because of the fact that "inconsistencies in the cybercrime lexicon have regularly been reported as a reason behind insubstantial cross border liaisons […] incongruent transnational cooperation and unsuccessful investigations leading towards increasing cybercrime incidences […] which in turn causes congestion of law enforcement and industry resources."[footnoteRef:1] [1: The only paper referenced in the above and below paragraphs will be the basis of this review, namely: Stabek, A, Watters, P and Layton, R. (2010). The Seven Scam Types: Mapping the Terrain of Cybercrime. 2010 Second Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing Workshop/Internet Commerce Security Laboratory at the University of Ballarat. Retrieved October 7, 2011, from .]

In order to properly fulfill its purpose the paper accepts that it must utilize various scams to both render its classification useful, but also to further examine and refine its framework. For this reason, content analysis is based on 250 scam descriptions, stemming from over 35 scamming categories and over 80 static features. Thus, these can be classified into seven scam types and into four top scamming functions.

The motivation for this study is, as stated briefly above, both a lack of uniformity and a lack of consistency, according to the authors, in scam classification, that has prevented the successful resolution of some cases. The authors there show strong evidence and cite a variety of such cases, including from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and the Environics Research Group, successfully achieving its objective of presenting a framework for this problem, for which more details will be given in the sections below.

Intended Audience

Due to both the purpose of the study and the highly technical terms utilized, one can assume that an intended audience for this is:

1) Students who are also studying and trying to enable the successful placement and utilization of uniform formulas

2) Professors or other intellectuals involved in the field from an academic standpoint

3) Individuals involved in the field from a practical standpoint (i.e. police officers and other law enforcement whether local, national, or international).

One can clearly see that the descriptions offered, including the descriptions of the scams are thus highly technical, a mentioned above, and are meant for the individuals described above, who are familiar with the topic and can benefit from knowing these descriptions, such as the one provided below relatively early in the referenced study:

"Scam descriptions offer a rich source of information pertaining to the reporting institution's understanding of individual schemes. From analyzing the content of a scam description, a detailed representation of scam processes can be understood. The purpose of the analysis performed here was to identify homogeneous subsets of scam cases. This was achieved through the use of hierarchical clustering analysis and discriminant function analysis. The aim of this research was to formulate clusters of scam cases derived from similarity matching principles based upon the purposely derived static features of scam descriptions."

The utilization of terms such as the above-mentioned hierarchical clustering analysis and discriminant function analysis by the authors, could thus only be understood by industry experts, and the same can hold true for similarity matching principles or even the derived static features of scam descriptions provided further in the report.

Details of the Study

This study is replete with all kinds of details, which only cement its purpose and make it that much more appealing to the intended audience. The study is thus-based strongly upon evidence. The structure is presented well, through seven parts, which begin with the introductory paragraph and continue with motivation for the study, reports of the analysis, methodology, results, discussion and conclusions. In other words, technically, the study is very strong. Furthermore, both the methodology, results/discussion sections give very good insight into the study's purposes. For example, in the methodology section, the authors go into detail on exactly how they achieved their results, and why they utilized various regressions, and in the results/discussion sections, the results of the paper are very well presented and discussed.