Kelly Watson
There is a substantial and expanding body of data that indicates that crime often runs in families. Prior studies, however, solely looked at conventional crimes, and there is very little information available on the familial risk factors for cybercrime. The current study investigates the criminal activity of the relatives of a sample of cyber criminals charged in the Netherlands in order to fill this vacuum in the literature. The sample comprises of two matched sets of 979 typical offenders and 979 non-offenders, as well as 979 cybercriminals who were charged with computer trespassing between 2001 and 2018. To gauge criminal activity among family members, Dutch Statistics kinship data and judicial information were combined. It was discovered that criminal dads, mothers, and siblings were more prevalent among traditional and cyber criminals than among non-offenders. However, further investigation revealed distinct trends between cyber criminals who just committed cyber offences and those who also committed traditional crimes. In terms of family offences, the first group of cyber criminals resembled non-offenders whereas the second group resembled traditional offenders more. Overall, these findings imply that traditional methods of crime transmission across generations are only partially able to account for the prevalence of cybercrime.
