[Book Review] Cybercriminal Networks: Origin, Growth and Criminal Capabilities

Abstract

Crime follows opportunity, and the application of digital technology to banking has provided criminal opportunities of which old-time bank robber Willie Sutton never dreamed. These opportunities may be seized by individual criminals; on a larger scale, they are vulnerable to exploitation by what Rutger Leukfeldt refers to as “cybercriminal networks.”

The book, based on Leukfeldt’s PhD thesis, is the very model of a modern multi-method research study. It combines the analysis of eighteen cases from Dutch police files; interviews with Dutch police and prosecutors; in-depth interviews with specialised investigators involved in twenty-two cases in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States; secondary analysis of 600 representative cases from the fraud registration database of a major Dutch bank; secondary analysis of a Dutch cybercrime victimization survey (N=10,316); and semi-structured interviews with thirty individual victims of online banking fraud. To his credit, the author painstakingly sets out his data collection and sampling strategies, and alerts the reader to the limitations on generalizability that these may entail.