Cyber Crime

Crime happens every day around the world. Although one crime in particular has had a great amount of growth, this crime has been classified as “Cyber Crime”. This type of crime was first acknowledged in the mid 1980’s and is now committed from millions of computers, cell phones, and other pieces of technology every day. It has also had a significant amount of growth over the past decade due to the increase of internet users and the rapid reproduction of technology. The effect that cyber crime has on the economy and its victims is very drastic. In the 1990’s cyber crimes were estimated at 80 million dollars in damages caused by nationwide virus outbreaks. The most common committed types of cyber crime would be fraud, unauthorized computer access, cyber terrorism and copy right violations.
Fraud has been titled “the broadest category of cyber crime”. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2008, there were 275,284 complaints filed for fraudulent activity in the United States alone. Fraud crimes are punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was passed by congress in 1984. Although many of these crimes that are committed are never brought to justice because of lazy government officials and clean cyber criminals. There are also different types of fraudulent activity. Some of the types would be credit card, wire, auction and business fraud.
Credit card fraud is committed through unauthorized access and charges to a person or business’s credit card. In order for a cyber criminal to commit credit card fraud they must have a form of wire fraud completed first to retrieve the information of the card. Wire fraud is fraudulent activity committed only through electronic communications. Electronic communications includes computers, phones, handhelds, etc. Business and auction fraud are the same kind of fraud because it simply involves the non-delivery of paid merchandise to the consumer, the only difference between the two would be a one...