Cybercrime committed via smartphones has become a prominent form of offending among young adults, yet research has tended to examine risk factors and protective factors in isolation rather than considering how they operate together. This study examines how three risk factors and three protective factors drawn from established criminological theories are associated with cybercriminal perpetration, and whether the protective factors buffer the criminogenic influence of the risk factors. Strain, association with cybercriminal peers, and low self-control are examined as risk factors, drawing on general strain theory, social learning theory, and self-control theory; morality, perceived punishment, and blocking opportunity are examined as protective factors, drawing on social control theory, deterrence theory, and opportunity theory.
Data come from a quota sample of 301 university students in Seoul, South Korea, who reported on eight forms of smartphone-based cyber-offending. Hierarchical ordinary least squares regression models estimate the independent association of each factor with perpetration as well as the nine interactions between the risk and protective factors. All three risk factors are positively associated with cybercriminal perpetration in the baseline model, with association with cybercriminal peers showing the strongest effect.
Among the protective factors, morality and blocking opportunity remain negatively associated with perpetration in the fully specified model, whereas perceived punishment does not. Morality attenuates the influence of cybercriminal peers, and blocking opportunity attenuates the influence of both peer association and low self-control. The findings indicate that cybercriminal behavior is shaped not only by risk factors acting independently but also by their interplay with internal moral controls and situational constraints, and suggest that prevention combining cyber ethics education with technological and situational measures may be more effective than approaches relying primarily on deterrence.
Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Soongsil University, Seoul, Republic of Korea Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA The authors declare no competing interests.
This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. The survey was conducted in July 2018 as a departmental research project at Soongsil University and was not designed with a view to publication; the decision to publish was taken subsequently. It was not submitted to the university’s Institutional Review Board before data collection because it was judged to fall within the categories eligible for exemption from IRB review under Article 15(2) of the Bioethics and Safety Act and Article 13 of its Enforcement Rule, namely an anonymous, minimal-risk, self-administered survey of consenting adults collecting no unique identifying information and no sensitive information.
No institutional policy or departmental approval procedure existed under which such projects were separately cleared at that time, and no approval document or reference number was issued in 2018. Written informed consent was nevertheless obtained from every participant prior to data collection. When the authors decided to prepare the study for publication, the protocol, survey instrument, consent form, and anonymized dataset were submitted to the Institutional Review Board of Soongsil University for retrospective review.
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