The Spatiotemporal Pattern and Driving Factors of Cyber Fraud Crime in China

Shuai Chen,Tian Ma,Dong Jiang,Mengmeng Hao,Shize Zhang,Shunde Li,Chundong Gao,Fangyu Ding

doi:10.3390/ijgi10120802

Abstract

As a typical cybercrime, cyber fraud poses severe threats to civilians’ property safety and social stability. Traditional criminological theories such as routine activity theory focus mainly on the effects of individual characteristics on cybercrime victimization and ignore the impacts of macro-level environmental factors. This study aims at exploring the spatiotemporal pattern of cyber fraud crime in China and investigating the relationships between cyber fraud and environmental factors. The results showed that cyber fraud crimes were initially distributed in southeastern China and gradually spread towards the middle and northern regions; spatial autocorrelation analysis revealed that the spatial concentration trend of cyber fraud became more and more strong, and a strong distinction in cyber fraud clustering between the north and the south was identified. To further explain the formative causes of these spatial patterns, a generalized additive model (GAM) was constructed by incorporating natural and social environmental factors. The results suggested that the distribution of cyber fraud was notably affected by the regional economy and population structure. Also, the high incidence of cyber fraud crime was closely associated with a large nonagricultural population, a high proportion of tertiary industry in GDP, a large number of general college students, a longer cable length, and a large numbers of internet users.

Highlights

With the increasing popularization of the internet and technology of communication, cyberspace has become the basis for social, political, economic, cultural, and many other aspects of human life [1]
By the end of 2017, cyber fraud crimes had developed from initial discrete cities into several contiguous regions, covering almost all prefecture-level districts of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Henan, Guangdong, Hunan and Hubei Provinces
Most cyber fraud cases were distributed in cities on the southeastern side of the Huhuanyong Line [44], and only a few occurred on the northwestern side

Summary

Introduction

With the increasing popularization of the internet and technology of communication, cyberspace has become the basis for social, political, economic, cultural, and many other aspects of human life [1]. Known as internet fraud or online fraud, is a typical economic cybercrime that makes use of the internet and could involve concealment of information or providing misleading information for the purpose of tricking victims out of money, property, or any other interest [3]. Frequent instances of cyber fraud include, but are not limited to, online purchase fraud, online romance scam, email fraud, phishing, and identity theft. These illegal actions have become increasingly rampant all over the world and have raised extensive concerns in many countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online applications, such as online education and online payment, has grown rapidly, which provides opportunities for criminals to steal personal information, spread illegal content and carry out cyber fraud, thereby rendering the situation even worse [4,5]

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