This paper draws from social network analysis and diffusion theory to study the case of a mortgage fraud that spread undetected for five years in British Columbia, Canada. The fraud is studied from the point of view of 559 victims who unknowingly invested in the Ponzi scheme which defrauded 2285 investors for a total of…
This study extends the opportunity theory of victimization to consider the social capital of adolescents at school. We argue that social capital might act as a protective factor potentially encompassing both the concepts of guardianship and target attractiveness. Drawing on a sample of 5395 adolescents interviewed in the context of the 2007 National Crime Victimization…
The sexual exploitation of children online is seen as a global issue and has been addressed by both governments and private organizations. Efforts thus far have focused primarily on the use of image hash value databases to find content. However, recently researchers have begun to use keywords as a way to detect child exploitation content….
Purpose: Unlike other plant‐based drugs, cannabis is increasingly grown within the country of consumption, requires minimal processing before consumption, and can be easily grown almost anywhere using indoor or outdoor cultivation techniques. Developments in agronomic technologies have led to global growth in domestic cultivation, both by cannabis users for self‐ and social‐supply, and by more commercially‐oriented…
US federal law enforcement operations occurring between 2001 and 2005 attempted to disrupt the online piracy scene, targeting copyright piracy rings known as ‘warez groups’. Previous work on warez groups has demonstrated a paradoxical situation where attempts to curtail warez group activities through policing and advancements in DRM only further encourage such groups to crack…
The current study examines significant variations in criminal achievement across sex offenders. To examine the “successful” sex offender, the study proposes a concept of achievement in sexual offending defined as the ability to maximise the payoffs of a crime opportunity while minimizing the costs. The study is based on a sample of convicted adult male…
Typically, the development of gang typologies have used either behaviorally based or structurally based characteristics to develop a classification system of gangs. The current study aims to assess the results of typologies approached from both angles, drawing from the same data source. It also examines whether using a combination of both approaches would prove to…
Drug dealing among drug users has been associated with elevated risk-taking and negative health outcomes. However, little is known about the cessation of drug dealing among this population. We assessed time to cessation of drug dealing using Cox regression. We also used generalized estimating equation (GEE) analysis and chi-square analysis to examine factors associated with…
** both authors had equal contributions, order of authors picked randomly In this paper, we take advantage of aerial police detection data and compare them to an analysis of airborne hyperspectral imagery to estimate the size of outdoor cannabis production in a high density cultivation area located in British Columbia, Canada. The results suggest that…
A well-known finding of research on illegal markets is that drug-dealing organisations operate in risky and uncertain market and intra-organisational conditions that considerably limit their size and their survival time. Yet, little is known about the organisations or individual dealers who are more successful than others at avoiding arrest and incarceration, especially in regard to…