McMurdie 2016), due to the quickly-evolving and vast nature of these crimes (Holt 2018), which typically involve more effort and cross-border expense and access difficulties than do most offline crimes in the Pursue mode. Policing has been slow to adjust to the rise of digital crimes and fraud, not least because it often means giving up functions currently performed, which meet resistance (HMICFRS 2019a(HMICFRS , 2019b."Effectiveness" in policing cybercrime needs to be clearly defined and should be seen on a spectrum. The evolution of cybercrime and cyber offender strategies is fast paced, making studying and reporting on them a difficult task. In addition to this challenge, the vast majority of research is undertaken, produced, and disseminated in English and focuses on a minority of sites where actively publishing western academics are based (Cross 2018).Yet, the scope of cyber offenders, their involvement in a range of illegal activities, and the costs of policing cyber offenders, stemming from cross-jurisdictional offences, generate serious concerns for law enforcement agencies throughout the world (Carroll and Windle 2018; Gilmour 2014; Malby et al. 2013). However, little is known about the attitudes of law enforcement towards cyber offenders in those countries in which statesponsored and state-tolerated cyber offending occurs: it is simply assumed or inferred from unsuccessful pursuit that little is being done there, at least until they victimise their local populations, setting aside often well-informed and severe reactions to those deemed to be "political opponents" or acting without authorisation from those in power. Cyber offenders operate broadly across borders, creating mutual legal assistance problems, which arise from variation in legal definitions provided by different statutes (Harkin, Whelan, and Chang 2018; McMurdie 2016) as well as institutional problems of conflicting priorities even where the offenders are not statesponsored or state-tolerated/corruptors. Except where political pressure or comity can be applied from abroad, enforcement agencies generally prioritise their domestic cases over international ones. As a result, cyber offenders encounter police services that differ in their approaches for detecting, investigating, and disrupting incidents associated with cyber offenders and their collaborators/competitors. These discrepancies, in turn, lead to uncertainties about the use of disruption strategies and their effectiveness, particularly in cross-border contexts, in addition to any uncertainties for evaluations arising from uneven but generally poor data availability.With limited resources and expertise, especially in opportunity principle countries where discretion is formally allowed, 1 law enforcement must make explicit or implicit strategic decisions in its approach, focusing on what it believes will yield the largest impacts while working within the political and economic constraints of its local CrimRxiv Evaluating Criminal Transactional Methods in Cyberspace as Understood in...
