The role of love stories in Romance Scams : A qualitative analysis of fraudulent profiles

The Online Romance Scam is a very successful scam which causes considerable financial and emotional damage to its victims. In this paper, we provide a perspective that might be helpful to explain the success of this scam. In a similar way to the "The Nigerian letter", we propose that the scam techniques appeal to strong emotions, which are clearly involved in Romantic relationships. We also assume that the same success factors found in normal relationships contribute to the success of the romance scam. In an exploratory study using a qualitative analysis of fraudulent profiles from an international dating website, we examined this assumption. The findings show that personal affinities related to personal romantic imaginations, which are described by personal love stories, play an important role in the success of a romance scam. © 2016 International Journal of Cyber Criminology (IJCC)

Structural analysis of Online Romance Scams by applying the transtheoretical model in conjunction with the theory of personal love stories

The internet has become an important communications platform which people choose for personal interactions. One of the most popular manifestations is the creation and maintenance of social relationships using social and dating websites. Unscrupulous operators have identified its potential for reaching vulnerable people and have started using it as platform for their criminal activity in the form of so-called Online Romance Scams. Quickly, this cybercrime has become very successful and thus an increasing threat in the social networking environment. The Online Romance Scam causes considerable financial and emotional damage to the victims. In this research we introduce a theory which helps to explain the success of this scam. In a similar way to the “The Nigerian Letter”, we propose that the scam techniques appeal to strong emotions, which are clearly involved in Romantic relationships. We also assume that the same success factors of normal relationships contribute to the success of the Romance Scam. Previous research into normal relationships has identified personal “love stories” as an important factor for the development of relationships. We have suggested that these personal love stories will have a key role in fraudulent relationships. The aim of this research is to explore Online Romance Scams as a type of ‘virtual love’ which initially creates happiness for the victim in a virtual romantic relationship, but tragically then causes the victim to be separated from his or her savings. Using narrative research methodology, this research will establish a model of the Romance Scam structure and its variations regarding human romantic attitudes. During the research program, the analysis of publicly available data from the internet were used, and as a consequence of this, appropriate ethical usage of research data is discussed. Findings of this research will contribute to the knowledge of the Online Romance Scam as significant crime, and provide information about the structure and the development of the modus operandi which can be used to identify an online relationship as a scam at an early phase in order to prevent significant harm to the victim.Doctor of Philosoph

Sufferer's market: sufferation and economic ethics in Jamaica

In Jamaica the economic environment is characterized by abiding foreign dependence, stagnant growth, and deficient development. This thesis, based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Montego Bay is concerned with the everyday understanding and management of Jamaica's adverse economy. This is explored through an ethnographic analysis of economic practice among five groups variously involved in Montego Bay's tourist sector. These groups include Sindhi merchants, local craft vendors, an artisan cooperative, a Rastafarian tour village, and local lottery scammers. Their dynamic case studies illustrate a diverse set of responses to the constricted political, economic, and social structures of the Jamaican economy, depicted as one of comprehensive and inescapable precariousness, or as a state of sufferation. This thesis examines these groups' everyday strategies and ethics of survival in sufferation, which include articulations of market failure, production, commercial skill, cultural property, and capital seizure. From these strategies emerges an understanding of how notions of history, citizenship, race, and cooperation structure the formation of economic practice, and bear upon constructions of the market

Platform Feminism: Celebrity Culture and Activism in the Digital Age

Platform Feminism: Celebrity Culture and Activism in the Digital Age tells the story of digital platforms' role in the feminist movement during the early 21st century. Taking celebrity culture as a potent site at which to analyze the new visibilities of feminism and its responses to a new wave of conservative and deeply reactionary politics, I explore the ways in which networked publics coalesce around celebrity events and, in discussing, analyzing, and critiquing various actors within these events, engage in boundary work around what it means to “be a feminist.” From responses to celebrity harassment to hashtag campaigns supporting celebrity feminism to critiques of imperfect feminist celebrities, this dissertation explores the contentious debates about feminism that arise around celebrity culture within digital spaces. To analyze these discourses, this project draws together literature from three often-disparate academic subfields: platform studies, feminist media studies, and celebrity studies. Using a case study approach, each chapter draws on intersectional feminist theory to examine a celebrity event from 2014-2016 that incited controversy across a variety of media platforms around issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. I track each event across online and legacy media outlets and engage in multiplatform critical technocultural discourse analysis to analyze how discussions amongst issue publics that coalesce around each event both reflect and further define contemporary feminist discourses in ways that are often distinctly shaped by the digital platforms on which they emerge (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández 2016, Brock 2016). In contrast to prior feminist media studies research that argues popular culture is largely postfeminist, I demonstrate that feminism, amplified by the famous voices that espouse it and the broad reach of the digital spaces in which it appears, has increased its discursive power so greatly that many aspects of popular culture no longer take for granted the gains of the feminist movement but rather feminism itself. Further, the iteration of feminism that is ideologically dominant espouses the importance of intersectionality, calling out the limitations of white liberal feminism and foregrounding the importance of a feminist platform that interrogates racial, sexual, and class differences. Overall, I argue that digital platforms have emerged as a major techno-cultural infrastructure for the dissemination and negotiation of the positions, goals, and actions of the contemporary feminist movement, which experienced a resurgence in the wake of the crisis of neoliberalism. While established media institutions continue to inform popular understandings of feminism, it is the recirculation, re-mediation, and conversations around print, film, and television media images and discourses on digital platforms that are driving the ongoing shifts in the feminist movement. More specifically, I contend that celebrity culture is a potent site at which the very category of “feminism” is being challenged in these digital spaces. Together, digital platforms and celebrity culture form a crucial discursive arena where postfeminist logics are unsettled, opening up the possibility of a more radical, intersectional, and activist popular feminism.PHDCommunicationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145855/1/lawsonc_1.pd

”Et nää on näitä meiän kyberhyökkäyksiä nämä” – The government of one and all in everyday digital security in Finnish Lapland

The government of one and all in everyday digital security in Finnish Lapland This study contextualises the gradual institutionalising of conventional concepts of cybersecurity by providing a more human-centric perspective. While discussion of cybersecurity can be encountered in daily news and in the workplace ever more frequently, its content and practical implications often remain abstract to everyday life. When cybersecurity is understandably addressed in highly technical and/or strategic terms, involving specific threat imageries and vocabularies, the mundane effects of the (un)successful securitisation of cyberspace can receive less attention. However, it is precisely these everyday effects that justify and undermine everyday cyber/digital security, and influence the respective security roles assigned to all citizens in emerging cyber-physical societies. Drawing out commonalities and differences between human security and governmentality studies, this thesis critically examines the entanglement of digitalisation and cyber/digital security in Finnish Lapland: opportunities it provides and concerns it awakes in sparsely populated areas characterised by harsh climate, cultural diversity, long distances, and infrastructural issues, all of which relate to imagery of the Arctic as a developing region. It investigates the power relations and positions thus created, mainly through securitisation, development, and resilience. However, it also incorporates the related techniques of responsibilisation, human rights, commercialisation, surveillance and transparency, and, finally, techniques of the self, which aim at the assimilation of modern governmentality but also provide the means for its resistance. While digitalisation in Lapland is carried out with the stated aim of continuing service provision or improving it, it is efficiency and cost calculations that drive it. Digitalisation and cyber/digital security are not generally examined together but as two separate trajectories. This thesis brings them together hence addressing both positive (freedom to) and negative (freedom from) security. It also provides localised research on the effects of digitalisation in the northernmost areas of Finland, Sweden and Norway, partially addressing a gap in the current knowledgebase. The research was carried out by problematising the mainstream framings of cyber/digital security from a number of individual security perspectives: applying human security to digitalisation and cybersecurity in the European High North, examining the interconnection of digitalisation and regional re-organisation of health and social services, studying the responsibilisation of the users of digital sharing economy platforms in contract law, and through a case study on the use of ICT and views on the requisite security roles amongst people living in Lapland. The synthesis re-problematises a human security approach to digitalisation through governmentality studies. This move visualises power relations embedded in human security that regardless of its emancipatory aim turn the approach to support modern governmentality through responsibilisation of individuals and communities for their own security and wellbeing. The theories and approaches covered in this thesis show that a multitude of human behaviours in digitality ought to be acknowledged and security practices able to accommodate it developed. In the prevailing framings of cybersecurity, ICT corporations and states and/or societies are constituted as the main objects and subjects of security, whereas individuals are expected to behave in a digisavvy and safe manner and thus contribute to the overall effort of securing cyberspace. The main forms of public support in meeting the requirements of this kind of subjectivity are information provision, guidance and training, as well as societal accessibility policies. The aims of and values embedded in digitalisation remain unquestioned and increased connectivity is automatically expected to improve everyone’s quality of life. However, digitalisation also leads to novel inequalities, power imbalances and dependencies – or aggravates the existing ones – and to a loss of self-sufficiency. Digitalisation will not be turned around. However, as the power relations and positions it creates have not yet been firmly institutionalised, there is possibility to impact them, to turn them into networked relations that take people’s needs, wants and wishes into account – instead of advancing digitalisation merely in the terms of technology and/or administration. Instead of approaching people as a vulnerability and hence in need of education and support, they ought to be viewed as subjects who can decide for themselves. At the heart of this struggle is the question of what kind of world we wish to live in.Yksilön ja yhteisön hallinta arkipäivän digitaalisen turvallisuuden kautta Lapissa Tutkin tässä väitöskirjassa kyberturvallisuuden tavanomaisia, vähitellen institutionalisoituvia käsitteellistyksiä ihmiskeskeisestä näkökulmasta. Samalla kun kyberturvallisuudesta on tulossa uutisten ja työpaikkakeskusteluiden vakioaihe, sen sisältö ja käytännön vaikutukset jäävät usein abstrakteiksi ja kaukaisiksi ihmisten arkipäivän kokemuksesta. Tekninen ja/tai strateginen lähestymistapa kyberturvallisuuteen jättää kyberavaruuden (epä)onnistuneen turvallistamisen arkipäivän vaikutukset suhteellisen vähälle huomiolle, mikä on aiheen teknisyyden ja turvallisuuspoliittisen merkityksen vuoksi ymmärrettävää. Samalla se kuitenkin tuo mukanaan tietyt uhkakuvastot ja sanastot aiheen käsittelyyn, mikä rajoittaa sitä, millaisia sisältöjä kyberturvallisuus voi saada ja millaisia politiikkatoimia siihen voi kohdistua. Siitäkin huolimatta, että juuri ihmisten arkipäivän kokemukset joko oikeuttavat tai kyseenalaistavat kyber-/digiturvallisuuden politiikkana ja ne turvallisuusroolit, joita kansalaisille kehittymässä olevissa kyber-fyysisissä yhteiskunnissa asetellaan. Tarkastelen tutkimuksessa digitalisaation ja kyber-/digiturvallisuuden kietoutumista yhteen inhimillisen turvallisuuden ja hallinnan analytiikan teorioiden avulla. Keskityn digitalisaation avaamiin mahdollisuuksiin ja sen herättämiin turvallisuushuoliin Suomen Lapissa, jota luonnehtivat vähäväkisyys, kulttuurinen monimuotoisuus, haasteellinen ilmasto, pitkät etäisyydet ja infrastruktuurihaasteet. Edellä mainitut piirteet vaikuttavat siihen, että arktiset alueet mielletään usein kehittyviksi alueiksi ja niihin kohdistetaan tämän mukaisia politiikkatoimia. Mielikuvan mukaiset puhetavat ja käytännön toimet luovat valtasuhteiden ja valta-asemien verkoston, mitä havainnollistan pääosin turvallistamisen, kehityksen ja resilienssin tekniikoiden kuvauksen kautta. Kuvaukseen sisältyvät myös edellisiin liittyvät vastuuttamisen, ihmisoikeuksien, kaupallistamisen, valvonnan ja läpinäkyvyyden tekniikat, samoin kuin itsetekniikat, joilla pyritään modernin hallinnallisuuden sisäistämiseen, mutta jotka samalla mahdollistavat sen vastustamisen. Vaikka Lapin digitalisoitumisen julkilausuttu tavoite on ylläpitää tai parantaa palveluiden tarjontaa, sitä edistävät ensisijaisesti tehokkuus- ja kustannuslaskelmat. Digitalisaatiota ja kyber-/digiturvallisuutta tutkitaan yleensä kahtena erillisenä kehityskulkuna. Väitöskirjassa tuon nämä kehityskulut yhteen ja tarkastelen niin positiivista (vapaus johonkin) kuin negatiivista (vapaus jostakin) turvallisuutta. Lisäksi kontekstualisoin tutkimuksen Suomen, Ruotsin ja Norjan pohjoisimmille alueille, joilta vastaavanlaista tutkimusta on suhteellisen vähän. Tutkimuksessa problematisoin kyber-/digiturvallisuuden valtavirran käsitteellistykset yksilöturvallisuuden eri näkökulmista: soveltamalla inhimillisen turvallisuuden lähestymistapaa digitalisaatioon ja kyberturvallisuuteen Euroopan pohjoisimmilla alueilla, tarkastelemalla digitalisaation ja alueellisen terveys- ja sosiaalipalveluiden uudistuksen välisiä kytköksiä, tutkimalla jakamistalouden digitaalisten alustojen käyttäjien vastuuttamista sopimusoikeudessa sekä tapaustutkimuksella Lapin asukkaiden tietotekniikan käytöstä ja näkemyksistä kyber-/digiturvallisuuden roolituksista. Väitöskirjan synteesi problematisoi inhimillisen turvallisuuden lähestymistavan uudelleen hallinnan analytiikan avulla. Tämä teko visualisoi inhimillisen turvallisuuden sisältämät valtasuhteet, jotka voimaannuttamispyrkimyksistään huolimatta ajautuvat tukemaan modernia hallinnallisuutta vastuuttamalla yksilöt ja yhteisöt heidän omasta turvallisuudestaan ja hyvinvoinnistaan. Väitöskirjan sisältämät teoriat ja lähestymistavat painottavat inhimillisen käytöksen moninaisuutta digitaalisuudessa, mikä pitäisi tunnistaa ja kyetä huomioimaan turvallisuuden käytännöissä. Kyberturvallisuuden valtavirran käsitteellistyksissä tieto- ja viestintäteknologiayritykset sekä valtio ja/tai yhteiskunta ovat turvallisuuden pääasialliset viittauskohteet ja toimijat. Yksilöiden oletetaan toimivan taitavasti ja turvallisesti siten tehden oman osansa kyberavaruuden turvallistamisessa. Pääasialliset julkisen tuen muodot tämänkaltaisen toimijuuden saavuttamiseksi ovat tiedon tuottaminen, ohjaaminen ja harjoitukset, sekä erilaiset saavutettavuuspolitiikat ja -ohjelmat. Digitalisaation tavoitteita tai sen edistämiä arvoja ei kyseenalaisteta. Sen sijaan parempien viestintäyhteyksien oletetaan automaattisesti parantavan jokaisen elämänlaatua. Digitalisaatio kuitenkin tuottaa myös uudenlaista epätasa-arvoisuutta, vallan epätasapainoa ja riippuvuutta samalla kun se vahvistaa aiempia epätasa-arvoisuuksia ja riippuvuuksia sekä heikentää itseriittoisuutta ja omaehtoisuutta. Digitalisaatio ei ole kehityskulku, joka on käännettävissä ympäri. Niin kauan kuin sen luomat valtasuhteet ja -asemat eivät ole vahvasti institutionalisoituneet, niihin voidaan vaikuttaa. Tavoitteena tulisi olla valtasuhteiden verkosto, joka huomioi ihmisten tarpeet, tavoitteet ja toiveet sen sijaan, että digitalisaatiota edistetään ainoastaan teknologian ja/tai hallinnon ehdoilla. Sen sijaan, että ihmiset hahmotetaan haavoittuvuutena ja siksi koulutuksen sekä tuen kohteena, heidät pitäisi nähdä toimijoina, jotka päättävät omasta puolestaan. Tämän valtataistelun keskiössä on kysymys siitä, millaisessa maailmassa haluamme elää