Book Review of Cyber Criminology: Exploring Internet Crimes and Criminal Behavior

As cyber crime has proliferated exponentially across the globe, those in the criminal justice field have lacked suitable and updated knowledge concerning the pedestrian reality of modern cyber crime. Popular media has created an image of cyber crime that suggests a lone hacker breaking through seemingly impossible security measures to access lucrative secret data. Crimes like these are very rare, but cyber crime is all too common. Criminals use the Internet to commit fraud, harass or bully people, download illegal pornography, or download stolen music far more than they use the Internet to violate national security. Edited by K. Jaishankar, Cyber Criminology: Exploring Internet Crimes and Criminal Behavior is a collection of chapters on cyber crime which focuses on common instances of internet crime that law enforcement officials are likely to deal with on a daily basis. The chapters within this edited collection are written by international scholars and provide the reader with provocative and thoughtful viewpoints upon which to develop one’s own thoughts. Moreover, the book strengthens a timely and necessary debate among academics and practitioners, and beyond. While ordinary everyday crimes may seem minor, they cause the most victimization. With more people around the world spending more time on the Internet for work and entertainment, criminals are able to find and exploit suitable targets far more often than in the past, which is emphasized by Professor David Wall in his Foreword, “Even if we do not use the Internet, much of our personal information will be stored somewhere on a networked computer, so in one way or another it affects all of us” (p. xi). The individual crimes are often small, but they have a huge effect in aggregate financial losses and are difficult to pursue legally because of the international nature of much of the crime. The chapters are organized into topical sections, somehow loosely related because of the variety of crimes and perspectives of analysis. Preceding the five sections, Jaishankar’s Introduction sets the stage for all of them. He also summarizes his “Space Transition Theory of Cyber Crimes” (STT) (2008), which tries to show why people behave differently when they move from one space to another. Jaishankar’s theory is closely related to opportunity theories, anonymity as a crime predictor and Marcus Felson’s (2003) convergence settings approach. Thus, STT relies on opportunity, space and