Steve Purser Steve Purser is Director ICSD Cross-Border Security Design and Administration at

The arrival of affordable and reliable network technology in the nineteen-nineties, followed by the move towards global connectivity and the success of the Internet as a medium for carrying out business, have drastically changed the way in which the modern enterprise operates. The positive aspects of this network revolution are difficult to overstate. Large international concerns have been able to make majo

ICTs and financial crime: an innocent fraud?

The democratizing dimension of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) is a widely accepted proposition. Although this is repeatedly emphasized and explained by economic, political and social theories that deal with the analysis of the Information Society, a good deal of its significance has been systematically neglected. ICTs are exclusively approached either from the perspective of the globalization of knowledge or from the perspective of economic productivity. However, the democratizing role of ICTs includes an aspect that is far less treated yet more relevant: its ability to provide a greater transparency in the political, economical and social management of societies. This article describes the connection between the use of ICTs and financial crime; reports the fraud that, in the author’s opinion, is being created by means of ICTs, and claims the need of a greater attention for ICTs as a tool to fight the lack of transparency and white-collar crime