1.

Journal name: Internet Journal of Criminology

Background
Although there is an association between crime and gambling there is relatively little information
and research on the topic. One area that appears to have become more prevalent over the last five
years is that of fraudulent gambling activities on the Internet. This paper briefly outlines how many
frauds and scams have moved into technological media such as the Internet and overviews a
number of these including: (i) lottery scams, (ii) fake gambling site scams, (iii) betting software
scams, (iv) gambling ‘bonus’ scams, (v) ‘twofer’ scams, and (vi) prize scams. It is concluded that
gambling fraud on the Internet is a growth area because many gamblers themselves want to get a
huge reward from a small outlay (just as the fraudsters do).

As long as there are people who are prepared to risk money on chance events, there will be
those out there who will want to fraudulently take their money from them. Given the complete lack
of empirical data on these fraudulent practices, there is a need for research to be initiated in this
newly emerging area of criminological concern.

Literature review
According to Smith, Wynne and Hartnagel, (2003), gambling related crime tends to relate to
one of four distinct types. These are:

• Illegal gambling – Gambling activity that is counter to jurisdictional regulations statutes, such as
operating without a gambling license, cheating at play, etc. Authors have examined illegal ways that
players get money from particular forms of gambling such as slot machines (see Griffiths [1994] for
an overview of illegal ploys used to make money from slot machines in the UK).

• Criminogenic problem gambling – Activities such as forgery, embezzlement, and fraud, typically
committed by problem gamblers to support a gambling addiction (Yeoman and Griffiths, 1996;
Griffiths and Sparrow, 1998).

• Gambling venue crime – Crimes that occur in and around gambling locations, such as loan
sharking, money laundering, passing counterfeit currency, theft, assault, prostitution and vandalism.
There is also other specific gambling-related criminal activity involving violence against gaming
industry employees usually as a result of when gamblers lose money in betting shops (Griffiths and
Hopkins, 2001) or amusement arcades (Parke and Griffiths, 2004; Griffiths, Parke and Parke, 2005).

• Family abuse – Victimization of family members caused by another family member’s gambling
involvement, (e.g., domestic violence, child neglect, suicide, and home invasion) (Griffiths, 2006).
2. Journal name: Journal of Financial Crime (2016)

Background
There is a strong sense of negativity associated with online fraud victimization. Despite an
increasing awareness, understanding about the reality of victimization experiences is not apparent.
Rather, victims of online fraud are constructed as greedy and gullible and there is an overwhelming
sense of blame and responsibility levelled at them for the actions that led to their losses. This belief
transcends both non-victims and victims. The existence of this victim-blaming discourse is significant.

Based on interviews with 85 seniors across Queensland, Australia, who received fraudulent
emails, this article establishes the victim-blaming discourse as an overwhelmingly powerful and
controlling discourse about online fraud victimization. However, the article also examines how
humour acts as a tool to reinforce this discourse by isolating victims and impacting on their ability to
disclose to those around them.

Literature review
This article presents findings from a project that examined the issue of online fraud
victimization, particularly as it relates to seniors. This research was undertaken by the author during
her employ- ment with the Queensland Police Service, Australia. Seventy-two face-to-face semi-
structured interviews with seniors (aged 50 years or older) across Queensland who had received a
fraudulent email request was conducted in the second half of 2009, to determine the reasons why
they decided to respond or not respond to the fraudulent email request. The majority of participants
were recruited through media releases and other public notifications. However, almost half the vic-
tims were known to the Queensland Police Service and were invited to take part in the research
based on their known victimization experiences. It was surprising and unexpected that a number of
people who responded to a fraudulent email came forward as a result of the public call for par-
ticipation, given the stigma associated with this type of victimization. It must be noted, though, that
those who came forward as the result of the public call were at the lower end of victimization, in
that they had responded to an email and not suffered any monetary losses (in the case of phishing
emails) or had suffered very small monetary losses. Those who experienced financial losses
amounting to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars were recruited exclusively through the
Queensland Police Service.
3. Article Title: Fraud in Electronic Payment Transactions: Threats and
Countermeasures (2013)

Background
With the development of the Internet in the 1990s and subsequent evolution of electronic
commerce (e-commerce) have given rise to a dynamic business environment where transactions
take place without face to face interaction. The International Telecommunication Union reported
that internet is quickly becoming the first stop for people for making decision about buying services
and products over internet and that the number of internet users has reached 2.3 billion in 2011.
The increase in the volume of transactions has given rise to numerous electronic payment (e-
payments) systems. Recent studies (Manning 1998, Wortington 2000) agree that electronic payment
transactions have been in use for quite some years, like automatic teller machines (ATM), credit and
debit cards, direct deposit and direct payment. Innopay Online payment report (2011) found that
there is massive growth in the market for digital goods and this has given rise to numerous payment
systems making the process of payment over the Internet easier for consumers. E-payment ensures
smooth, secure and efficient transactions in e-business.

Literature Review
In order to assess the risks of and combat payment fraud there should be an understanding
of its many facets. E-payment frauds have a multiplicity of types and there is no exact number or
fixed list of these types. Frauds are classified as online fraud and offline frauds. Online frauds occur
when fraudster possess legitimate company to obtain sensitive personal information and illegally
conduct transactions in the existing accounts. Phishing and spoofing are examples of online frauds.
Online frauds occur when fraudster steals personal information such as credit number, bank account
number or other identification and uses it repeatedly to open new account or pledges transaction in
the real individual/company‟s name. Offline fraud includes credit card fraud, phone solicitations,
print fraud, check scams and mail fraud. Department of Justice (DOJ) U.S has divided frauds
(computer fraud) into three categories: 1) crimes in which computer hardware, peripherals, and
software are the target of a crime; where in the fraudster obtains objects illegally: 2) crimes in which
the computer is the immediate subject of a crime, that is the attacks are on a computer or a system,
destruction or disrupting of which is the damage caused; and 3) crimes in which computers and
related systems are the means or "instrument" by which ordinary crimes are committed, such as
theft of identities, data, or money or the distribution of child pornography. There are different types
of e-fraud and all of these attack in a slightly different way. Fraud can occur in a number of ways as
listed below.

Account Hacking: Hacking includes gaining illegal entry into a person computer (PC) system.
Fraudster use compromised customer credentials to hijack the origination system and use it in the
lawful account holder‟s name.

Identity theft: Identity theft/fraud refer to crime in which fraudster illegally obtains and uses
another person personal information in some way that involves deception or fraud to gain
something of value. Identity theft/fraud is the most serious crime for the person whose information
is stolen as well as the financial institution.
Phishing: Phishing is a well-known technique for obtaining confidential information from a user by
posing as a trusted authoring. Phishing is an attempt by fraudster to „fish‟ for your baking details
through emails with attachment or hyperlinks.

4. Article Name: Online Auction Fraud and Criminological Theories: The

Background
Cyberspace’s inherent lack of spatiality and temporality (Choi, 2010) has created new forms
of e-commerce that did not previously exist. One of the most prevalent forms of e-commerce is the
online auction which allows individuals to buy and sell new and used goods via the Internet to the
highest bidder regardless of geographical locations of the buyer and seller. This has revolutionized
commerce in a way that could not have happened previously. Prior to online auctions, a seller’s pool
of potential buyers was limited to the geographic area where the item for sale was kept. Even
expanding those boundaries by advertising the item for sale in a newspaper or magazine afforded
the seller relatively limited prospects. Online auctions transcend all geographic boundaries not only
allowing sellers to locate a multitude of potential buyers genuinely interested in their item (Albert,
2004), but to also take advantage of the increased demand and sell the item at a higher price.
Without utilizing the Internet, sellers would not have access to the large pool of buyers, nor would
they make as much money per transaction.

Literature Review
A myriad of well-informed theories exists about crime in general, but only recently have
experts begun to study cyber criminals and cyber crime within the context of these theories. By
applying universally recognized theories to Adrian Ghighina specifically, we may begin to understand
more about the causation and motivations of offenders that engage in online auction fraud. Routine
activities theory, social learning theory, general deterrence theory, and rational choice theory all
offer explanations as to why Ghighina chose to participate in this type of deviant behavior; and in
general, why, online auction fraud is so common.

Although some argue that as a theory Rational Choice falls short in explaining the nature of
expressive crimes (Hayward, 2007), economic behavior is generally analyzed using tenets of rational
choice (Brown, Esbensen & Geis, 2010). Online auction fraud is a crime committed primarily for
economic gain and therefore rational choice applies in the causation and motivations of offenders.
Rational choice theory posits that offenders are rational people who weigh the benefits of engaging
in a particular criminal behavior against the risks associated with that behavior (McQuade, 2006).
With regards to Adrian Ghighina, there were two primary benefits in engaging in online auction
fraud. First, fraudulently selling big ticket items netted substantial financial gains for Ghighina and his
co-offenders. Because they opted to “sell” only expensive items, one fraudulent auction transaction
yielded thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. For Ghighina, the high monetary yield gained from
a single transaction was more attractive than the alternative of conducting multiple fraudulent
transactions with lower yields. Increasing the number of transactions meant more time spent
opening fraudulent bank accounts and a greater number of victims, both of which could increase the
perceived risk of being caught.
5. Article title: FraudMiner: A Novel Credit Card Fraud Detection Model
Based on Frequent Itemset Mining

Background
Fraud detection is generally viewed as a data mining classification problem, where the
objective is to correctly clas- sify the credit card transactions as legitimate or fraudulent. Even
though fraud detection has a long history, not that much research has appeared in this area. The
reason is the unavailability of real worlds data on which researchers can perform experiments since
banks are not ready to reveal their sensitive customer transaction data due to privacy reasons.

Moreover, they used to change the field names so that the researcher would not get any
idea about actual fields. Due to this scarcity of real dataset, not many fraud detections models have
been developed and described in the academic literature, and even fewer are known to have been
implemented in actual detection systems. Still we can find some successful applications of various
data mining techniques [4, 5] like outlier detection, self-organizing maps, neural network, Bayesian
classifier, support vector machine, artificial immune system, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithm, K-
nearest neighbor, and hidden Markov model in fraud detection.

Literature Review
The support vector machines (SVM) are statistical learning techniques first introduced by
Cortes and Vapnik (1995) and they have been found to be very successful in a variety of classification
tasks [27]. Support vec- tor machines are based on the conception of decision planes which define
decision boundaries. A decision plane is one that separates between a set of different classes.
Basically, SVM classification algorithms tend to construct a hyperplane as the decision plane which
does separate the samples into the two classes—positive and negative. The strength of SVMs comes
from two main properties: kernel representation and margin optimization. Kernels, such as radial
basis function (RBF) kernel, can be used to learn complex regions. This algorithm finds a special kind
of linear model, the maximum margin hyperplane, and it classifies all training instances correctly by
separating them into correct classes through a hyperplane. The maximum margin hyperplane is the
one that gives the greatest separation between the classes. The instances that are nearest to the
maximum margin hyperplane are called support vectors. There is always at least one support vector
for each class, and often there are more. In credit card fraud detection, for each test instance, it
determines if the test instance falls within the learned region. Then, if a test instance falls within the
learned region, it is declared as normal; else it is declared as anomalous. This model has been
demonstrated to possess a higher accuracy and efficiency of credit card fraud detection compared
with other algorithms. Even for multidimensions and continuous features SVMs are the one of first
choice [27]. SVM methods require large training dataset sizes in order to achieve their maximum
prediction accuracy.