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Society creates perimeters within which its members are expected to operate and employ sanction to stimulate, reinforce and dissuade certain behaviours. Social values generally define what society considers appropriate, right, noble or worthy behaviour. They drive the goals individuals set for themselves. However, when societal values are built on wrong principles or are clearly inconsistent, members’ goals become illfocused .This paper attempts to clarify some conceptual issues on social values, and traces the problem of online advance fee fraud, otherwise called yahoo-yahoo, among Nigerian youths to Nigeria values crisis and inconsistency. It sees this crisis as permeating every stratum of the Nigerian society and argues that a society that celebrates wealth, regardless of its source will produce a generation of youths who will in their pursuit of wealth indulge in all kinds of social vices, including cyber crime and criminality. It considers values re-orientation a panacea for cyber crime control.

Digital and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technologies have altered traditional forms of social relationships across modern societies and have raised critical concerns about social order in the cyberspace. The amorphous and borderless nature of virtual communities have allowed various deviants, criminals and terrorists elements to permeate them. The resultant criminogenic atmosphere has created a new research agenda for the discipline of criminology. This paper examines the emergence of cyber criminology as a twenty-first century field of criminology and argues that its growth is a fall-out of concerns about the increasing rate of crime and disorder in the cyberspace. Cyber criminology seeks to offer explanation to the causation of deviance, crime and terrorism in the cyberspace. The paper which is anchored on Jaishankar’s Space Transition Theory and Cohen and Felson’s Routine Activity Theory highlights the challenges, prospects and future direction of the evolving field of cyber criminology and its relevance to the quest for order in the Nigerian cyberspace.