Towards digital organized crime and digital sociology of organized crime

Abstract

As technology has changed people’s lives, criminal phenomena are also constantly evolving. Today’s digital society is changing the activities of organized crime and organized crime groups. In the digital society, very different organized crime groups coexist with different organizational models: from online cybercrime to traditional organized crime groups to hybrid criminal groups in which humans and machines ‘collaborate’ in new and close ways in networks of human and non-human actors. These criminal groups commit very different organized crime activities, from the most technological to the most traditional, and move from online to offline. They use technology and interact with computers for a variety of purposes, and the distinction between the physical and virtual dimensions of organized crime is increasingly blurred. These radical developments do not seem to be accompanied by a new criminological theoretical interpretive framework, with a definition of organized crime that is able to account for the changes that digital society brings to organized crime and generate modern research hypotheses. This article proposes the concept of digital organized crime and the spectrum theory of digital organized crimes, to be embedded within a current, revised sociological theory of the organization of crime and deviance in digital society (a new theory of digital criminal organizing) and argues that the study of digital organized crime will increasingly require a digital sociology of organized crime. Criminologists are called upon to work in this direction.

Reconceptualising organised (cyber)crime: The case of ransomware

“…Although we view the idea of a continuum as useful, this approachalong with others who have sought to show the relevance of conceptualisations of organised crime to cybercrime (e.g., Broadhurst et al, 2014;Wall, 2015) does not explicitly address some of the more contentious elements of organised crime definitions (i.e., extralegal governance as a core feature of organised crime). We agree that narrow, inflexible definitional approaches applying "partially obsolete paradigms" (Di Nicola, 2022) to the concept of organised crime have outlived their usefulness. The paper advances scholarship by proposing an approach to organised crime that is appropriate for both traditional organised crime and organised cybercrime.…”

“…Our approach in this paper has sought to integrate these differing perspectives by incorporating the criminal activities and criminal organisation elements (see Di Nicola, 2022;von Lampe, 2015) in addition to the key concept of extra-legal governance (see Leukfeldt et al, 2017a;Varese, 2017). Thus, rather than existing definitions, we have advocated the use of core characteristics of organised crime as an optimal starting point for conceptualising organised (cyber)crime.…”

“…We employed three such characteristics elucidated in a framework developed by von Lampe (2015). This framework addresses criminal structures and activities, which can clearly involve physical and digital forms (Broadhurst et al, 2014;Di Nicola, 2022;Wall, 2015), while recognising that extra-legal governance is a core feature of organised crime (Varese, 2010) and, as such, distinguishes organised crime from crime that is organised (Finckenauer, 2005). We have argued that the key concepts of violence and territory, which have been interpreted to hold qualitatively different meanings when comparing organised crime operating in physical and digital domains, require rethinking in the contemporary digital economy and society.…”

“…As recent scholarship advancing a “digital criminology” has argued, framing technological and non-technological as distinct from, or oppositional to, each other is no longer helpful or relevant in contemporary society (see Powell et al, 2018). This approach has been applied to a range of crime and justice issues, most notably various forms of technology-facilitated violence (e.g., Henry et al, 2020) but more recently to types of cybercrime (Mackenzie, 2022), cyber security (Dupont & Whelan, 2021), and organised crime (Di Nicola, 2022). Di Nicola (2022) advanced an interpretive framework that reflects the many potential ways in which new technologies may bring about changes in the organisation of criminals and their activities.…”

Unpacking the political-criminal nexus in state-cybercrimes: a macro-level typology

“…Existing empirical evidence suggests that most criminal groups operating online are formed of relatively loose and transient networks of relationships (e.g., Wall 2015;Leukfeldt et al 2017; for a critical analysis, see also Lavorgna 2020a). However, both in professional and academic literature forms of co-offending at the basis of serious forms of profit-driven cybercrimes have often been described as forms of organized crime, at times distinguishing them among different sub-types depending on their internal organization and/or the activities carried out (e.g., Choo and Smith 2007;McGuire 2012;Leukfeldt et al 2019;Wang et al 2021;Di Nicola 2022;Kranenbarg 2022). In doing so, these studies have often used the term 'organized crime' in a broad sense, recognizing that its online manifestations somehow differ from its occurrences in the physical world, and consequently the organized crime label should be used in a more fluid way in the cyber domain (e.g., Di Nicola 2022), where different forms of criminality are becoming increasingly blurred (Choo and Smith 2007).…”