Cybercrimes@gambling_sites.com

Abstract

Online gambling sites have proliferated exponentially since the mid-1990s generating billions of dollars in revenue annually. However, this successful global industry is frequently the target or the perpetrator of cybercrime, which pose serious problems for gambling operations and players worldwide. This thesis explores cybercrimes at gambling websites, focusing on the organizational dynamics of crime, criminality, and criminal communication. I draw on theories of criminal organization and cyberspace to develop an integrated theory that accounts for how criminals organize, operate, and network in digital environments around the six dimensions of space, time, movement, scope, structure, and preservation.

I employ a document analysis methodology for this thesis, by examining gambling commission reports, journal articles, newspaper and magazine articles, security archives, technical white papers, and "how-to-do-it" hacker manuals. Documents published between 1996 and 2008 are collected from the internet, university libraries, and journal databases, and this data is coded around seven intersecting areas: internet gambling and cybercrime; organized crime, cyberextortion, and money laundering; hacking and cracking; cheating and collusion; fraud, non-payment of winnings, and software tampering; underage gambling; social control measures against cybercrime.

I find that cybercrimes occurring at gambling sites involve a variety of criminals and an assortment of digitized techniques, both of which range in their organizational sophistication. I argue that while my integrated theoretical framework adequately captures crimes and criminality occurring exclusively in cyberspace, it requires modification along the concepts of space, time, and structure to address the organizational traits of crimes and criminals in 'hybrid' space. I then evaluate my revised integrated theory along the criteria of scope, coherence, causality, and predictive power to demonstrate theoretical growth. Finally, I offer a theoretical proposition that can be used as a point of departure for future cybercrime studies in the criminological discipline.