Author: Edited ByDonald Rebovich, James M Byrne
ISBN No: 9781003258100 (ebook)
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages: 252
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Publisher URL:
https://www.routledge.com/The-New-Technology-of-Financial-Crime-New-Crime-Commission/Rebovich-Byrne/p/book/9781032192024
Year of publication: 20/01/2023
Brief:
The New Technology of Financial Crime
price
£39.19 ebook, hardback £104
Business and everywhere else has gone digital; but so too have the criminals, who have commonly gone into business e-mail compromise and e-mail account compromise, non-payment and non-delivery fraud, and investment scams.
A first chapter looks at the UK official Cybersecurity Breaches Survey, to tease out which cyber measures are effective in preventing breaches and viruses, spam, hacking, and denial of service attacks.
Ironically, for saying that cyber is all about data, and oceans of it, the chapter authors note that private sector cyber victims have been mostly neglected in criminological research, for lack of data.
Naturally, copying what works will save money – although complicated by the fact that what works for a charity may not work for a business, and what works for a large firm might not for a small one. The authors find that those that invest more financial resources in cyber security are generally more likely to report suffering cyber-attacks and their negative effects. Surely if you spend more on cyber, you should prevent attacks? As the authors say, maybe businesses that are investing in cyber more are doing so because they know they are at risk and seek to mitigate it. In other words, something as basic as the connection between cyber spend and being a victim needs confirming.
Among the suggestions is that ‘organisations with institutional e-mail addresses increase the number of attacks they face by almost four times in comparison to companies without organisational e-mail accounts’, and likewise companies with website and social media accounts increase their number of cyber incidents.
Those that prevent their employees from using their personal devices for doing business are doing right, right? The authors find those firms tend to report a larger number of cyber-attacks; but is that because all the fraudulent e-mails are simply going to company devices instead? In sum, ‘what works’ appears far from straightforward. The authors do sum up by pointing to the ‘in-house guardian’, of your own cyber security teams, that seem ‘to generate the best results for preventing cyber-attacks and their negative impacts’. Your human resources and employees’ online self-protection by providing training, are the most promising ways to minimise attacks, the authors conclude, rather than ‘just basic software protection and guidance about strong passwords’.
A sign of how cyber is not simply a technical affair but has emotional effects on victims is most explicit in the chapter by the Australian criminologist Cassandra Cross of Queensland University of Technology, who’s the co-author of a book on cyber frauds with the British criminologist in this field, Prof Mark Button; and indeed the two were speakers at Portmouth’s winter economic crime webinar earlier this week. Dr Cross suggested that investment schemes and cryptocurrencies are driving romance fraud. To return to the chapter in this book, some argue that romance fraud ‘can be viewed as a form of advance fee fraud’. Based on data given by victims to the authorities in Australia, via their Scamwatch online reporting, researchers found a ‘military narrative’ used by the fraudster in 375 of 2478 cases; in other words, a fair fraction. Why a military identity? In the first place, to make a connection with a potential victim. In other words, the military ID builds trust with the victim, and the fraudster then asks for money, for help with gaining an inheritances, or because of a medical emergency, after a car crash (which makes the victim feel sympathetic); or some other assistance for family members; or to pay for fees in a criminal justice case, or (to get a bit more specific) gold bars have got stuck in customs and the military veteran needs money to have them released. Or some mix of these stories. The military cover story can help the fraudster by letting them spin a story of a ‘need for secrecy’, ‘usually framed in terms of security for themselves’ and perhaps covert ‘special missions’, while ‘on duty’. As with any study, the aim is to understand, in this case to seek reasons why someone becomes a victim of such a fraud. The researchers admit that the reason for victimisation here ‘may be more diffuse and less subject to nuanced risk factors’ than we’d wish. If such fraudsters are getting through because they happen to (brutally) dupe the victim, to ‘manipulate and exploit the feelings of love and compassion’, what works to cut that link? The researchers suggest ‘continuous messaging to reduce victims’ likelihood of responding in the first place’. In other words, it’s for the social media platforms hosting these fraudsters to ‘automatically detect, quarantine, filter, or delete social media profiles and private messaging by profiles’. That is, when using dating websites you need to keep ‘a healthy amount of skepticism and critical thinking’.
As ever, singling out these two chapters is unfair because the other chapters have value too, such as the study of Baidu Tieba (a Chinese version of Craigslist) that suggests ‘different types of fraud are perpetrated online and that victimisation methods are associated with particular types of media’. A later chapter looks at United States identity theft cases, in terms of ‘the potential utility of the use of machine learning approaches’ to analysing and tackling such crime. In chapter two, ‘phishing evolves’, thanks to approaches to information technology security people, “hackers,” and academic researchers, we learn that it ‘has never been easier to conduct a simple attack, but a good attack requires more effort than ever before’. As this shows, the book is creditably international in its net cast (just as, alas, the fraudsters are).
As ever, the value (and value for money) in such a book of essays each of roughly 8000 words, is that you potentially can dip into far more learning – and carry on your study from there – than if you buy one or two books by a single author.
