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ABSTRACT AND ARTICLE INFORMATION
The study of white-collar crime has evolved over the past eight decades. So too has the nature of white-collar crime. Varieties of white-collar crime have changed as the types of occupations evolved. One change in the occupational arena that has likely impacted white-collar crime involves technological changes. In particular, with the advent of the computer, new opportunities for crime have developed within the workplace and outside of it. Few studies, however, have explored cybercrime within a white-collar crime framework. To address this void in the literature, in this study, a sample of 109 cases investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice are reviewed in order to determine how these cybercrimes can be characterized as white-collar crimes.
Article History:
Received January 16, 2018
Received in revised form June 21, 2018
Accepted June 25, 2018
Keywords:
cybercrime, white collar crime
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In 1939, Edwin Sutherland introduced the concept of white-collar crime in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, an academic speech receiving unprecedented media coverage and calling attention to crimes in various areas including the medical profession, the political arena, the securities industry, and the banking system, to a name a few (American Sociological Association, n.d.; Sutherland, 1940). A decade later he wrote about the concept in his seminal work White-Collar Crime, where he defined the behavior as "crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" (Sutherland, 1949, p. 9). Here again, Sutherland discussed an assortment of crimes committed by businesses and business representatives.
Of course, Sutherland did not talk about cybercrime. After all, because the technological revolution had not yet occurred, the term cybercrime had not yet been legally or socially constructed. It was not until at least two decades after Sutherland published his White-Collar Crime tome when it was recognized how technology was beginning to shape new types of crime. John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch because he was able to use a whistle that came from a cereal box to hack into phone lines in the early seventies, has been identified as one of the first individuals...