Online Deception and Situations Conducive to the Progression of Non-Payment Fraud

Adopting the criminal event perspective, we explore how online fraudsters make use of urgency cues in their interactions with potential victims throughout the progression of an online nonpayment fraud attempt. Integrating claims from the ‘Interpersonal-Deception Theory’ with situational explanations of crime, we investigate whether fraudsters’ presentations of verbal cues of urgency during the early stages of a criminal event are followed by a consistent presentation of verbal and non-verbal urgency cues. To answer this question, we posted a large number of ‘for-sale’ advertisements over a classified-ad website and interacted with online fraudsters and legitimate users who responded to our ads over email. Our findings highlight the relevance of the criminal event perspective in guiding research on targets and offenders in cyberspace

The contribution of age structure to the international homicide decline.

BackgroundSince 1990, the world's homicide rate has declined by nearly 20%. While prior research has documented parallel homicide declines across many individual countries, the causes of a shared international homicide decline remain unknown. Drawing on a worldwide process of population ageing, and on research linking age to criminal activity, this study investigates the contribution of global demographic shifts to the international homicide decline.MethodsWe draw from (1) a High Coverage Sample of 126 countries since 1990, and (2) a Long Series Sample of 26 countries since 1960 and utilize fixed-effect regressions to evaluate the impact of age structure on homicide trends. In addition, we use a quantile regression to explore variations in the relationship between age structure and homicide conditional on homicide levels.FindingsResults using the High Coverage Sample suggest no relationship between age structure and homicide. However, results from the Long Series Sample suggest that changes in the relative size of countries' youth population is a major predictor of homicide trends since 1960. In exploring this divergence, we find that the influence of age structure on homicide becomes less evident as other risk factors for violence gain prominence. Thus, while high homicide countries had the most to gain from falling homicide rates, the safety benefits of an ageing population have been concentrated among the least violent countries.InterpretationWhile the homicide declines of individual countries have often been attributed to domestic policies, the universality of international homicide trends suggests the influence of broader global phenomenon. We find that countries' homicide trends are strongly associated with changes in the size of their youth populations, particularly where there are few competing criminogenic forces. Based on these results, we propose an explanation for the international homicide decline, while highlighting the importance of demographic patterns in explaining homicide trends