Title: cybercrime | Definition, Statistics, & Examples | Britannica
Headings: Cybercrime
Cybercrime
law
Defining cybercrime
Types of cybercrime

Content: cybercrime | Definition, Statistics, & Examples | Britannica
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WRITTEN BY
Michael Aaron Dennis
Independent scholar. Author of A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical Practice at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930–1945. See Article History
Alternative Title: computer crime
Cybercrime, also called computer crime, the use of a computer as an instrument to further illegal ends, such as committing fraud, trafficking in child pornography and intellectual property, stealing identities, or violating privacy. Cybercrime, especially through the Internet, has grown in importance as the computer has become central to commerce, entertainment, and government. Because of the early and widespread adoption of computers and the Internet in the United States, most of the earliest victims and villains of cybercrime were Americans. By the 21st century, though, hardly a hamlet remained anywhere in the world that had not been touched by cybercrime of one sort or another. Defining cybercrime
New technologies create new criminal opportunities but few new types of crime. What distinguishes cybercrime from traditional criminal activity?