Internet crime: Cyber Crime - A new breed of criminal?

Abstract The “cyber criminal” sounds like a term to be applied to someone from a William Gibson book, and yet is all too real, and on a day to day basis wreaks havoc in our increasingly online world. In April 2001, the Government responded to this threat by announcing a $25 million initiative involving the creation of a National High-Tech Crime Unit to counter the growing use of the Internet for criminal activity. The online world is becoming increasingly vulnerable to criminal activity with 43% of the public identifying cyber crime as a ‘problem’. This article accordingly seeks to summarize the key areas of online criminal activity in order to summarise the types of crime which we are dealing with, and to seek to place them in an appropriate context in which their impact can be judged. At the outset, we should seek to distinguish between “true” cyber crime (i.e. dishonest or malicious acts which would not exist outside of an online environment, or at least not in the same kind of form or with anything like the same impact), and crime which is simply “e-enabled” (i.e. a criminal act known to the world before the advent of the worldwide web, but which is now increasingly perpetrated over the Internet).