Fraud in the Twenty-first Century
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Fraud in the Twenty-first Century Lars Korsell 1 Published online: 14 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Fraud is by no means a new phenomenon. In their contribution, Steven Kemp, Fernando MiróLlinares and Asier Monevare mind us of the Sicilian corn trader who deceived a potential customer for illicit gain in ancient Greece. Since then, the Internet has created new and substantial crime opportunities. The electronic use of payment card data to commit fraud is currently the fastest growing area of fraud crime in Sweden (Brå 2016). Fraudsters are increasingly analysing data from social media to target potential fraud victims. Another development, connected with information and communications technology, is the growingly cashless society. Some stores do not even accept cash any longer. Instead of cash, the money is circulating in an account environment with the use of payment cards and electronic transfers. The cashless society makes it more difficult for perpetrators to use traditional means to get access to money. Fraud might be the answer, but it is not as easy as merely taking money, especially not since Chip and PIN made stolen cards harder to use at scale. It is also a way of using modern technology to reach more victims. The idea behind the title Fraud in the Twenty-first Century of this special issue of The European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research is that fraud seems to become an even more increasing crime problem as society changes from “taking” someone’s item to deceive someone or a system to get access to what is valuable: money, information or access to different systems. That makes fraud the crime for the twenty-first century a crime which is enhanced and assisted by information and communications technology. This change from traditional property crimes and a society with visible banknotes and coins is obvious in the study of crime statistics. Since 2008, the levels of fraud in Sweden have increased in terms of both self-reported exposure to fraud and the number of fraud offences dealt with by the criminal justice system (Brå 2016). A large increase has been observed in both online fraud and payment card fraud. According to the “Swedish Crime Survey 2018”, 5.2% of the Swedish population have been victims of sales fraud, and 5.4% of card/credit fraud (Brå 2019). In 2019, 28% of the population (aged 16–84) stated that they were concerned about being a victim of fraud on the Internet. The proportion has increased slightly compared to 2018, when it was 25%. Seen over time, a slight increase can be discerned since 2017.
* Lars Korsell [email protected]
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The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, Box 1386, 111 93 Stockholm, Sweden
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L. Korsell
The increase of fraud is a good reason to pay more attention to the situation and the development. This special issue of journal contains six articles dealing with the problem of fraud in different aspects: – – – – – –
Property crime drops and the rise of fraud (Kemp et al. 2020)) A national fraud strategy and its problematic translation t
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