Computer-Related Crime

Abstract

It is pertinent to start a review of computer-related crime by attempting to answer this question. Some definitions are so wide as to encompass almost any crime in which a computer features: an example would be a man entering a high street domestic appliance store and running off with a home computer without paying for it. Whilst this is clearly crime and clearly involves a computer, the computer appears simply as an item of property and this type of straightforward theft merits no further discussion. Similarly, incidents such as that in which a supervisor and a systems analyst stole a large number of disk packs and tapes from a major company and demanded a ransom for their return we do not regard as being computer-related crime, but as no more than common theft and extortion. In this review, computer-related crimes are defined as those crimes during the commission of which some actual processing has taken place in a computer system: in other words, those crimes in which a computer has played an active rather than a passive role.