Cybercrime in America amid COVID-19: the Initial Results from a Natural Experiment

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered life, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leading many countries to issue "stay-at-home" orders to contain the virus's spread. Based on insights from routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson 1979), it is likely that COVID-19 will influence victimization rates as people alter their routines and spend more time at home and less time in public. Yet, the pandemic may affect victimization differently depending on the type of crime as street crimes appear to be decreasing while domestic crimes may be increasing. We consider a third type of crime: cybercrime. Treating the pandemic as a natural experiment, we investigate how the pandemic has affected rates of cybervictimization. We compare pre-pandemic rates of victimization with post-pandemic rates of victimization using datasets designed to track cybercrime. After considering how the pandemic may alter routines and affect cybervictimization, we find that the pandemic has not radically altered cyberroutines nor changed cybervictimization rates. However, a model using routine activity theory to predict cybervictimization offers clear support for the theory's efficacy both before and after the pandemic. We conclude by considering plausible explanations for our findings.

Cybercrime and shifts in opportunities during COVID-19: a preliminary analysis in the UK

“…Many have noted that most street crimes have decreased during lockdown due to reduced opportunities for physical convergence between offenders and targets (Ashby 2020a;Mohler et al 2020), as has also been shown in the UK (see Figure 1), while domestic abuse may increase since perpetrators and victims are required to remain confined in the same space for long periods of time (Piquero et al 2020). Some argue that the massive move towards home working and online shopping during the outbreak may also contribute to a displacement of crime opportunities from offline to online environments (Collier et al 2020;Hawdon et al 2020;Payne 2020;Payne et al 2020). In other words, as persons spend more time connected to the Internet, and less time on the streets, opportunities for street violent and property crimes decrease while Internet crimes may increase (Miró-Llinares and Moneva 2019).…”

“…For instance, many use their personal computers to access business information, web conferencing substitutes in-person meetings, online shopping grows as a way to purchase products and services, and businesses remain empty for weeks while households are occupied most of the time. If the pandemic-related lockdown measures are multiplying the use of computer networks for business and leisure, and the number of e-commerce users is growing rapidly (Office for National Statistics 2020a), it is also likely that new opportunities for the convergence described by RAA will arise on the Internet (Hawdon et al 2020). In this sense, Payne (2020) analysed data from the US Federal Trade Commission and observed that reports of most types of fraud increased during the first months of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019; Lallie et al (2020) noted that known cyber-attacks reported globally increased during the outbreak; and Collier et al (2020) observed an increase in denial of service attacks in the UK.…”

“…The everyday routine activities of millions of individuals have moved from physical to online environments, and opportunities for crime appear to have shifted towards cyber-dependent or cyber-enabled crime. Miró-Llinares and Moneva (2019) argued that the generalisation of Internet use may be associated with a shift in crime opportunities from offline to online environments, and it is plausible that the rapid societal transformations experienced during the outbreak, which have increased the frequency and variety of activities that users conduct online, have created new illegitimate opportunity structures online (Hawdon et al 2020;Lallie et al 2020).…”

Six Months In: Pandemic Crime Trends in England and Wales.

“…In recent months, studies have emerged internationally which have helped establish the extent to which crime (or police calls for service) during lockdowns have deviated from expected trends (see Table 1). These contributions have largely featured case study sites in the United States, including San Francisco and Oakland (Shayegh & Malpede, 2020), Los Angeles (Campedelli et al, 2020;Mohler et al, 2020), Detroit (Felson et al, 2020), Indianapolis (Mohler et al, 2020), Dallas (Piquero et al, 2020) and Chicago (Bullinger et al, 2020), although a small number of these have have examined multiple cities simultaneously (Ashby, 2020b(Ashby, , 2020a and nationwide (Hawdon et al, 2020). Although the focus has been in the United States, studies have also been conducted in the United Kingdom (Buil-Gil, Miro-Llinares, et al, 2020;Halford et al, 2020), Australia (Payne & Morgan, 2020a, 2020b, Sweden (Gerell et al, 2020) and Canada (Hodgkinson & Andresen, 2020).…”

“Show this thread”: policing, disruption and mobilisation through Twitter. An analysis of UK law enforcement tweeting practices during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…While increases in crime have also been reported for cybercrime (Buil-Gil 2020;Hakak et al 2020), including online fraud (e.g. Naidoo 2020; Cimpanu 2020), malware (Brumfield 2020), hacking and phishing (Muncaster 2020;Kumaran and Lugani 2020), Hawdon, Parti and Dearden (2020) report that cybercrime remained unchanged despite the swift change in routine activities. However, data on such crimes is more elusive and analyses-at least in the academic and open source literature-less complete than for more traditional crimes such as those discussed above.…”