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Routine activity theory and malware, fraud, and spam at the national level

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Abstract

Email spam is one of the primary means to facilitate the perpetration of internet fraud and the distribution of malware. The present research sought to examine the impact of routine activity theory at the national level on three forms of cybercrime perpetrated through email spam. A sample of 871,146 spam email messages sent in 2012 were divided into three categories: fraudulent emails, emails spreading malware, and non-serious spam emails. The measures were then aggregated by country and five measures of routine activity theory at the national level were tested for their impact on cybercrime among 120 nations. Concurrent with prior research, the results indicated that internet users per capita positively predicted all three forms of cybercrime. Unlike previous research, GDP presented a different relationship amongst all three outcomes: positive for spam, negative for fraud, and nonsignificant for malware. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Scripts in emails tend to be of the form “ < script language = ’JavaScript’ > ”, and so the pattern matcher would identify such text.

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Washington State University, Student Academic Center 401, Spokane, WA, 99210, USA

    Alex Kigerl

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Kigerl, A. Routine activity theory and malware, fraud, and spam at the national level. Crime Law Soc Change 76, 109–130 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-09957-y

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