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Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Volume 20, 2024

Reconsidering Crime and Technology: What Is This Thing We Call Cybercrime?

  • Jonathan Lusthaus1
  • Department of Sociology, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies & St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 20:369-385 (Volume publication date October 2024)
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Cybercrime is not a solely technical subject but one that involves human offenders who are susceptible to social scientific study. Yet, despite calls for cybercrime research to be mainstreamed, the topic remains a niche area within legal studies and the social sciences. Drawing on the most significant findings over recent years, this review aims to make the subject more accessible to a wide range of scholars by softening some of the perceived boundaries between conceptions of cybercrime and conventional crime. It examines these key themes in the literature: definitions and categories of cybercrime, cybercrime marketplaces, the governance of cybercrime, the importance of “place” within the world of cybercrime, cybercriminal networks, a discussion of what is new or old about cybercrime, and how we should define the concept going forward. The empirical literature on these themes suggests a simple definition is most appropriate: Cybercrime is crime that uses digital technology in a significant way.

Keyword(s): crime, cyber-dependent crime, cyber-enabled crime, cybercrime, technology
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2024-10-17
2025-06-14
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Reconsidering Crime and Technology: What Is This Thing We Call Cybercrime?
Annual Review of Law and Social Science 20, 369 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041822-044042
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041822-044042
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041822-044042
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