The Fear of Cybercrime by Waller Lloyd & Bailey Corin & Johnson Stephen

Author:Waller, Lloyd & Bailey, Corin & Johnson, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-976-673-897-4
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
Published: 2015-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Davis Wall (2008) explained that citizens who have been victimized or who have witnessed victimisation will be reluctant to engage in similar activities. In the cyber world, as explained by Wall, there might not have been actual attacks where fear of cybercrime is concerned. More often than not, those who live in fear have not necessarily witnessed an actual act (Wall 2008). Instead, their fear is generated from the over reporting or exaggeration of cybercrime in the media. There are even instances where persons may not even know or understand what cybercrime is; they merely label it as bad as a result of the magnitude of negative reporting which it has received. In turn, this alleged over-reporting spreads panic among the wider public who formulate a negative perception, which is converted to anxiety. This will most likely be reflected in their behaviours; persons may refuse to obtain a credit card due to fear of identity theft, or refuse to shop online due to lack of trust in the websites, or fear that their credit cards will be stolen given the magnitude of the reports that surface in the media. For those who have been victims of cybercrime however, it is only natural that they may develop a fear based on their past experiences (Aseef, Davis, Mittal, Sedky and Tolba 2005).

The Nature of Cybercrime

A major risk to electronic banking usage is identity theft. This form of cybercrime has many variants: phishing, pharming, hacking and ‘evil twins’ (Gan, Ling, Yih and Eze 2008). Identity theft has been a long-standing problem; even before the Internet existed, persons would forge documents and assume the identity of others. The emergence of the Internet has further facilitated this malicious practice. To date, there has been growing concern among the banking industry due to the rapid rate at which identity theft has been spreading among its customers. Identity theft has been conceptualised as the malicious use of another person’s identity to purchase merchandise, obtain credit or other valuable things. Whereas this is done manually offline, online identity theft has been achieved through the use of computer viruses, spyware, Trojans, worms, key loggers, pharming and phishing (Gan et al. 2008).

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