Understanding the journeys of online crime victims through law enforcement and support organisations in Britain

Digital technology has broadened online crime (the term here denotes cybercrime andfraud) enabling transnational offending. This research concerns victims of online crime and asks whom individuals and organisations can approach for help and advice after becoming a victim of online crime. Adopting an exploratory methodology, the research maps organisations, processes and connections between organisations supporting victims. The mapping process and the resulting data displays illustrate the journeys that victims of online crime take and how law enforcement, support organisations and service providers support victims. Snowball sampling was used to recruit 46 participants in the UK, who either worked with or were victims of online crime. Recruited participants worked in Britain’s law enforcement, government, businesses and support organisations. Through semi-structured interviews in addition to analysing official documents and reports, the research uncovered the roles and connections between specialist law enforcement units and support organisations supporting victims of online crime. Since 2010, the UK has categorised cybercrime as a Tier One threat and a Serious and Organised Crime (SOC). The research uncovered how Britain’s law enforcement considered cybercrime a SOC after WannaCry and adopted the 4P (Protect, Prevent, Pursue and Prepare) strategy from counterterrorism. In Britain, law enforcement operates within designated geographical boundaries which complicates their work concerning online crime that disregards boundaries. The research shows that law enforcement and its partners duplicate efforts and highlights that while support organisations support individuals, generally, they do not assist businesses. Further, the sheer volume of online crime seems to have overwhelmed law enforcement despite increased resourcing levels. While Action Fraud’s reporting systems are outdated and victims rarely report online crimes, participants reveal how victims struggle with feelings of blame, shame and embarrassment. The main contributions are the data displays and uncovering the vastly different journeys travelled by victims of cybercrime and online fraud

Tension Examined

My project entitled Tension Examined is a culmination of all my studies at Ball State. I synthesized some of the biggest lessons I learned to create an introspective performance and lecture. This project was a collaborative effort with the School of Music, Honors College, and The Theater and Dance Department. The musicians played the original music written by Sergei Prokofiev for the ballet Trapeze. The music was inspiring creatively and was a great entry point into ballet dance history. The main inspiration for this work is ballet dance history and the twists and turns it takes over time. I noticed that the extreme changes in dynamic, purpose, and perception of ballet aligned with a theory of progression I had studied in the honors college. Fredrich Hegel, a German philosopher, presented a theory titled the dialectical theory that explained these overcorrections throughout history and showed how they were a driving force in progress. With these three main elements I choreographed a show and lecture with the question, where is ballet going next, at its core.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?

Applying Social Networks to Snowball Sampling of a ‘Hard-to-Reach’ Population and to Illustrate Qualitative Findings

Ever since Moreno's sociograms were introduced in the 1930s, social network analysis has been a popular way of analysing existing and custom-built data. Social network analysis has been gaining popularity since online social networks were invented with their ever-increasing volumes of social media data available to extract and analyse. This paper explores using social networks as part of the methodology and data analysis stages of an existing research project. The research concerns victims of online crime asking who individuals and organisations can approach for cybersecurity help and advice after becoming online crime victims. Participants worked in UK law enforcement, government, businesses and support organisations. Two networks were built and analysed. The recruitment network monitored snowball sampling of a ‘hard-to-reach’ population-UK adults whose work concerned victims of online crime or who were online crime victims. The organisations' network described the landscape for supporting victims. The recruitment network tracked the recruitment of participants and highlighted successful and influential contacts in the network. The organisations' network explained and illustrated the qualitative findings. Social networks give insights into data missed by other methods of analysing data collected. Sociograms were added to text-based sections in the doctoral thesis to help explain the inherent messiness of the interdisciplinary field of cybercrime

Der Weg von Opfern von Online-Kriminalität durch die britischen Strafverfolgungsbehörden. Translated title: Understanding the journeys of online crime victims through law enforcement in Britain.

People rely on digital devices to conduct their lives and businesses online, however, the Internet has also enabled traditional crimes committed offline to migrate online, allowing these crimes to be committed transnationally. This creates difficulties for Britain’s law enforcement who have historically worked in forces within geographical boundaries, investigating crimes with offenders and victims at physical locations. Nowadays, victims can be scammed online from across the world and in different jurisdictions. Virtual currency does not require transportation, since it has no physical weight, so perpetrators can attack without moving from their digital devices or leaving physical clues. Victims seek support from law enforcement, support organisations, and social support from friends and family. The journeys of victims of online crime were explored during the main author’s PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. The study found broken systems, under-reporting and victims taking different journeys depending on whether they are victims of cyber-dependent or cyber-enabled crimes

Retail price promotion and regular price purchases: a replication

An often voiced concern of business practitioners relates to the value of academic research to their enterprise operations. The purpose of our research is to analyze a specific academic article that purports to provide retailers with insights as to the sales impact of pricing promotions and regular priced merchandise.(Mulhern and Padgett, Journal of Marketing, October, 1995). We replicated and extended the original study to test for possible effects of survey question positioning. The data was collected with the cooperation of a large Canadian Hardware store, and although this is a work in progress, the preliminary findings indicate the possibility of question positioning affecting the data collected. A further contribution of our research is to demonstrate the belief that a healthy scepticism of recommendations found in published academic research can be lessened through the use of replication and extension research

Advertising, product quality, and complex evolving marketing systems

The paper analyses the advertising as power vs. advertising as information controversy as well as its recent empirical testing. It is stressed that this distinction focuses too much on the interaction between consumer and manufacturer while ignoring the retailer as an important stake-holder. To compensate for this lack, a complex marketing system perspective is introduced in which consumer, retailer, and manufacturer interact. However, these complex marketing systems might drift towards market equilibria which are against the consumer interests: that is, firmsmight lock out brands from the market by means of trade and sales promotions and then use advertising to protect their position. Consequently brands of better quality and/or innovative brands are barred from trade shelves

Understanding Project Champions’ Ability to Gain Intra-Organizational Commitment for Environmental Projects

A key enabler of environmental projects is the ability of the project champion to gain commitment to the project from other stakeholders in his or her organization. This paper develops a model of commitment-gaining success that is based on intra-organizational influence theory. The model also includes the project payback, customer pressure, government regulation, top management support and the project champion’s position in the organizational hierarchy. The model was tested using survey data from 241 environmental professionals describing their attempts to gain the buy-in of purchasing managers, operations managers, industrial engineers and others for environmental projects. The results (obtained from hierarchical regression analysis) show that intra-organizational commitment is positively associated with the project champion’s influence behavior—in particular, the champion’s use of three influence tactics (inspirational appeals, consultation and rational persuasion) and avoidance of a fourth tactic (ingratiation). Commitment is also positively associated with project payback and with top management support for the environment and negatively associated with environmental regulation. The paper contributes to the OM knowledge base of environmental project implementation by bringing new theory to bear on the topic, by focusing on individual-level, rather than organization-level, variables and by taking a confirmatory, large sample approach which complements extant exploratory research. In addition, the paper contributes to the OM field by evaluating various antecedents to cross-functional integration. The results also provide specific guidance to those who champion environmental projects within their companies

The choice of Bass model coefficients to forecast diffusion for innovative products: An empirical investigation for new automotive technologies

Bass diffusion models are one of the competing paradigms to forecast the diffusion of innovative products or technologies. This approach posits that diffusion patterns can be modeled through two mechanisms: Innovators adopt the new product and imitators purchase the new product when getting in contact with existing users. Crucial for the implementation of the method are the values assigned to the two parameters, usually referred to as p and q, which mathematically describe innovation and imitation mechanisms. The present paper is based on the findings of a research project about policy measures to promote the diffusion of Electric Vehicles in Germany. It investigates how practitioners could choose adequate values for the Bass model parameters to forecast new automotive technologies diffusion with a focus on Electric Vehicles. It considers parameters provided by the literature as well as ad hoc parameter estimations based on real market data for Germany. Our investigation suggests that researchers may be in trouble in electing adequate parameter values since the different eligible parameter values exhibit dramatic variations. Literature values appear discussible and widely variable while ad hoc estimates appear poorly conclusive. A serious problem is that ad-hoc estimates of the Bass p value are highly sensitive to the assumed market potential M. So for plausible values of M, p varies on a high scale. Unless more consolidation takes place in this area, or more confidence can be placed on ad hoc estimates, these findings issue a warning for the users of such approaches and on the policy recommendations that would derive from their use