How Might Crime-Scripts Be Used to Support the Understanding and Policing of Cloud Crime?

Abstract

Abstract. Crime scripts are becoming an increasingly popular method for understanding crime by turning a crime from a static event into a process, whereby every phase of the crime is scripted. It is based on the work relating to cognitive scripts and rational-choice theory. With the exponential growth of cyber-crime, and more specifically cloud-crime, policing/law enforcement agencies are struggling with the amount of reported cyber-crime. This paper argues that crime scripts are the most effective way forward in terms of helping understand the behaviour of the criminal during the crime itself. They act as a common language between different stakeholders, focusing attention and resources on the key phases of a crime. More importantly, they shine a light on the psychological element of a crime over the more technical cyber-related elements. The paper concludes with an example of what a cloud-crime script might look like, asking future research to better understand: (i) cloud criminal fantasy development; (ii) the online cultures around cloud crime; (iii) how the idea of digital-drift affects crime scripts, and; (iv) to improve on the work by Ekblom and Gill in improving crime scripts.

To the moon: defining and detecting cryptocurrency pump-and-dumps

“…Since the price was inflated artificially, the price usually drops, leaving buyers who bought on the strength of the false information at a loss. While we do not provide a rigorous crime script analysis (see Borrion 2013;Keatley 2018;Warren et al 2017) here, Fig. 1 can be viewed as a script abstraction of three main stages-accumulation, pump, and dump.…”

Profiling the Cybercriminal: A Systematic Review of Research

“…A crime script analysis involves breaking down the actions of the criminal into four main stages: preparation, pre-activity, activity, and post activity. As this study claims, an appreciation of the offender's mind/perspective seems to be of the greatest importance in the creation of crime scripts, to better understand the behaviours, motives, feelings, decisions within the process of a crime [56].…”

“…We found that 22 (or, just over half of the) articles rely on new data, be it from surveys, interviews (with criminals and law enforcement), court records, case studies, underground markets or honeypots [3], [7], [8], [10], [11], [24], [29], [31]- [36], [43]- [45], [48], [49], [52], [57]- [59]. The other studies primarily use existing literature to form their arguments and often rely on research from other fields, or established approaches mapped to the cybercrime domain [2], [4], [5], [9], [12], [13], [15], [18], [21], [25], [27], [46], [50], [53]- [56]. This balance is interesting to note as it highlights the extent of articles on profiling that are not working with primary data.…”

“…The papers focusing on hackers study white hat, black hat hackers and hacktivists [3], [4], [7], [12], [13], [18], [21], [27], [49], [54]- [56]. The basis on which different members of the hacker community differentiate themselves is the ethics of their activities, such as black hat or white hat hackers which acknowledges the use of malicious or ethical applications of hacking [20].…”

“…Also, other work has used psycho-linguistic analysis [9] and crime script analysis [56] methods. A crime script analysis involves breaking down the actions of the criminal into four main stages: preparation, pre-activity, activity, and post activity.…”