By Nir Kshetri

This book is about the global cybercrime industry, which according to some estimates, is a US$1 trillion industry and is growing rapidly. It examines economic and institutional processes in the cybercrime industry, provides insights into the entrepreneurial aspect of firms engaged in cyber-criminal activities, takes a close look at cybercrime business models, explains the global variation in the pattern of cybercrimes and seeks to understand threats and countermeasures taken by key actors in this industry. This book’s distinguishing features include the newness, importance, controversiality and complexity of the topic; cross-disciplinary focus, orientation and scope; theory-based but practical and accessible to the wider audience; and illustration of various qualitative and quantitative aspects of the global cybercrime industry.

Cham: Springer, 2010. 252p.

Edited by Emilio C. Viano

This timely book provides contributions on international, comparative crime phenomena: gangs, trafficking, fear of crime, and crime prevention. It highlights contributions originally prepared for the XVII World Congress of Criminology and for the 2015 Cybercrime Conference in Oñati, Spain which have been selected, reviewed, and adapted for inclusion in this volume.

The work features international contributors sharing the latest research and approaches from a variety of global regions. The first part examines the impact of gangs on criminal activities and violence. The second part explores illegal trafficking of people, drugs, and other illicit goods as a global phenomenon, aided by the ease of international travel, funds transfer, and communication. Finally, international approaches to crime detection prevention are presented. The work provides case studies and fieldwork that will be relevant across a variety of disciplines and a rich resource for future research.

This work is relevant for researchers in criminology and criminal justice, as well as related fields such as international and comparative law, public policy, and public health.

Cham: Springer, 2017. 378p.

Edited by Babak Akhgar and Ben Brewster

This book comprises an authoritative and accessible edited collection of chapters of substantial practical and operational value. For the very first time, it provides security practitioners with a trusted reference and resource designed to guide them through the complexities and operational challenges associated with the management of contemporary and emerging cybercrime and cyberterrorism (CC/CT) issues.

Benefiting from the input of three major European Commission funded projects the book's content is enriched with case studies, explanations of strategic responses and contextual information providing the theoretical underpinning required for the clear interpretation and application of cyber law, policy and practice, this unique volume helps to consolidate the increasing role and responsibility of society as a whole, including law enforcement agencies (LEAs), the private sector and academia, to tackle CC/CT.

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  This new contribution to CC/CT knowledge follows a multi-disciplinary philosophy supported by leading experts across academia, private industry and government agencies. This volume goes well beyond the guidance of LEAs, academia and private sector policy documents and doctrine manuals by considering CC/CT challenges in a wider practical and operational context. It juxtaposes practical experience and, where appropriate, policy guidance, with academic commentaries to reflect upon and illustrate the complexity of cyber ecosystem ensuring that all security practitioners are better informed and prepared to carry out their CC/CT responsibilities to protect the citizens they serve.Description text goes here

Cham: Springer, 2016. 323p.

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Edited by Thomas J. Holt and Adam M. Bossler

This Major Reference Work synthesizes the global knowledge on cybercrime from the leading international criminologists and scholars across the social sciences. The constant evolution of technology and our relationship to devices and their misuse creates a complex challenge requiring interdisciplinary knowledge and exploration. This work addresses this need by bringing disparate areas of social science research on cybercrime together. It covers the foundations, history and theoretical aspects of cybercrime, followed by four key sections on the main types of cybercrime: cyber-trespass, cyber-deception/theft, cyber-porn and obscenity, and cyber-violence, including policy responses to cybercrime. This work will not only demonstrate the current knowledge of cybercrime but also its limitations and directions for future study.

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 1467p.

By Eddy Willems

This book describes the key cybercrime threats facing individuals, businesses, and organizations in our online world. The author first explains malware and its origins; he describes the extensive underground economy and the various attacks that cybercriminals have developed, including malware, spam, and hacking; he offers constructive advice on countermeasures for individuals and organizations; and he discusses the related topics of cyberespionage, cyberwarfare, hacktivism, and anti-malware organizations, and appropriate roles for the state and the media. The author has worked in the security industry for decades, and he brings a wealth of experience and expertise. In particular he offers insights about the human factor, the people involved on both sides and their styles and motivations. He writes in an accessible, often humorous way about real-world cases in industry, and his collaborations with police and government agencies worldwide, and the text features interviews with leading industry experts. The book is important reading for all professionals engaged with securing information, people, and enterprises. It’s also a valuable introduction for the general reader who wants to learn about cybersecurity.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2019. 231p.

By Jonathan Clough

We live in a digital age. The proliferation of digital technology, and the convergence of computing and communication devices, has transformed the way in which we socialise and do business. While overwhelmingly positive, there has also been a dark side to these developments. Proving the maxim that crime follows opportunity, virtually every advance has been accompanied by a corresponding niche to be exploited for criminal purposes; so-called 'cybercrimes'. Whether it be fraud, child pornography, stalking, criminal copyright infringement or attacks on computers themselves, criminals will find ways to exploit new technology. The challenge for all countries is to ensure their criminal laws keep pace. The challenge is a global one, and much can be learned from the experience of other jurisdictions. Focusing on Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal principles that apply to the prosecution of cybercrimes.

Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 505p.

Edited by Elena Martellozzo and Emma A Jane

The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the development of information technology, to the point that people spend a major portion of waking life in online spaces. While there are enormous benefits associated with this technology, there are also risks that can affect the most vulnerable in our society but also the most confident. Cybercrime and its victims explores the social construction of violence and victimisation in online spaces and brings together scholars from many areas of inquiry, including criminology, sociology, and cultural, media, and gender studies.

The book is organised thematically into five parts. Part one addresses some broad conceptual and theoretical issues. Part two is concerned with issues relating to sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation, as well as to sexual expression online. Part three addresses issues related to race and culture. Part four addresses concerns around cyberbullying and online suicide, grouped together as ‘social violence’. The final part argues that victims of cybercrime are, in general, neglected and not receiving the recognition and support they need and deserve. It concludes that in the volatile and complex world of cyberspace continued awareness-raising is essential for bringing attention to the plight of victims. It also argues that there needs to be more support of all kinds for victims, as well as an increase in the exposure and punishment of perpetrators.

Drawing on a range of pressing contemporary issues such as online grooming, sexting, cyber-hate, cyberbullying and online radicalization, this book examines how cyberspace makes us more vulnerable to crime and violence, how it gives rise to new forms of surveillance and social control and how cybercrime can be prevented.

London: Routledge, 2017. 251p.

By Majid Yar

Cybercrime and Society provides a clear, systematic, and critical introduction to current debates about cybercrime. It locates the phenomenon in the wider contexts of social, political, cultural, and economic change. It is the first book to draw upon perspectives spanning criminology, sociology, law, politics, and cultural studies to examine the whole range of cybercrime issues.

Thousand Oaks, CA; London: SAGE, 2006. 200p.

By United States. Department of the Treasury

From the Introduction: "This action plan responds to Section 7(c) of Executive Order (E.O.) 14067, 'Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets,' which calls for the development of a coordinated interagency action plan for mitigating the digital-asset-related illicit finance and national security risks as identified in the U.S. government's National Strategy for Combating Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing (Illicit Financing Strategy). [...] E.O. 14067 recognizes that digital assets may pose significant illicit financing risks and commits the U.S. government to mitigating these and any other national security risks. This action plan identifies priority and supporting actions to support this commitment in line with the priorities and supporting actions identified in the Illicit Financing Strategy specific to uncovering and mitigating the misuse of digital assets by illicit actors. These priority actions include monitoring risks, working with international partners to improve cooperation on and implementation of international AML/CFT [anti-money-laundering/countering-the-financing-of-terrorism] standards, strengthening our regulations and operational frameworks, and improving private sector compliance and information sharing, among others. The action plan begins with an overview of the illicit financing risks and U.S. government efforts to mitigate these risks before laying out these priority actions."

United States. Department of the Treasury. 2022-09-16. 20p.

By Erica Moret

No country in the world is immune to the devastating impacts of modern slavery and human trafficking. Representing one of the world’s most profitable criminal enterprises, it generates some USD 150 billion per year. Addressing the financial angle of these gross human rights abuses is recognized as an essential approach in tackling the problem. The engagement of the financial sector, alongside the use of several financial-related policy instruments, plays a vital role. This includes measures to counter money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

This report, commissioned by the Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAST) initiative at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), is based on 18 anonymized semi-structured interviews with officials from the UN, US, EU, UK, and Canada, financial institution representatives and experts on sanctions, modern slavery and human trafficking, transnational organized crime, supply chains, and corporate governance.

This report outlines a number of key findings and recommendations on the use of sanctions to target modern slavery and human trafficking.

New York: United Nations University, 2022. 64p.

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Edited by Giovanni Fiandaca

Where is a woman’s place in the mob? Does she even have one? Is the rise in women’s involvement in organized crime the darker side of their increased presence in the legitimate workplace, or simply a reworking of the mafia’s traditional male attitudes cloaked in the guise of women’s emancipation?

The insightful essays in Women and the Mafia seek to answer these questions from a wide range of academic disciplines and trace the portrait of women tied to organized crime in Italy and around the world. This book pulls back the code of silence and shines a light on the dark image of women entangled in organized crime.

The surprising first hand accounts of mafia women in Italy not only reveal women in power, "generals in skirts", but also tales of severe abuse and violence against women.

The book introduces us to the professional women of the Argentine "mafia state", Albanian human traffickers, spies for the Russian mob, runners for Brazilian numbers rackets, and the mystique of the American gangster moll.

New York: Springer, 2007. 300p.

By Selwyn Raab

For half a century, the American Mafia outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned the FBI and other police agencies, wreaking unparalleled damages to America's social fabric and business enterprises while emerging as the nation's most formidable crime empire. The vanguard of this criminal juggernaut is still led by the Mafia's most potent and largest borgatas: New York's Five Families.Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York's premier dons from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and more. This definitive history brings the reader right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime. The paperback has been revised and updated, with a new epilogue focusing on the trial of the notorious "Mafia Cops."

New York: A Thomas Dunne Book for St. Martin's Griffin; 2006. 784p.

By Peter B. E. Hill

The Japanese mafia - known collectively as yakuza - has had an extensive influence on Japanese society over the past fifty years. Based on extensive interviews with criminals, police officers, lawyers, journalists, and academics, this is the first academic analysis in English of Japan's criminal syndicates. Peter Hill argues that the essential characteristic of Japan's criminal syndicates is their provision of protection to consumers in Japan's under- and upper-worlds. In this respect they are analogous to the Sicilian Mafia, and the mafias of Russia, Hong Kong and the United States. Although the yakuza's protective mafia role has existed at least since the end of the Second World War, and arguably longer, their sources of income have not remained constant. The yakuza have undergone considerable change in their business activities over the last half-century.

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  The two key factors driving this evolution have been the changes in the legal, and law-enforcement environment within which these groups must operate, and the economic opportunities available to them. This first factor demonstrates that the complex and ambiguous relationship between the yakuza and the state has always been more than purely symbiotic. With the introduction of the boryokudan (yakuza) countermeasures law in 1992, the relationship between the yakuza and the state has become more unambiguously antagonistic. Assessing the impact of this law is, however, problematic; the contemporaneous bursting of Japan's economic bubble at the beginning of the 1990s also profoundly and adversely influenced yakuza sources of income. It is impossible to completely disentangle the effects of these two events. By the end of the twentieth century, the outlook for the yakuza was bleak and offered no short-term prospect of amelioration. More profoundly, state-expropriation of protection markets formerly dominated by the yakuza suggests that the longer-term prospects for these groups are bleaker still: no longer, therefore, need the yakuza be seen as an inevitable and necessary evil.

Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 336p.

By Nicholas Pileggi

Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill—the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the mafia gangster’s life—has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime” (Cosmopolitan).

This is the true-crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds…with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action.

New York: Pocket Books, 1987. 400p.

By Robert M. Lombardo

This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, Robert M. Lombardo challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America descended directly from the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread "alien conspiracy" theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers.

Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, Lombardo ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. From nineteenth-century vice syndicates to the modern-day Outfit, Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, Lombardo contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. This book also traces the history of the African-American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.

Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 257p.

By Mark Galeotti

Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of thevory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.

Thevory—as the Russian mafia is also known—was born early in the twentieth century, largely in the Gulags and criminal camps, where they developed their unique culture. Identified by their signature tattoos, members abided by the thieves’ code, a strict system that forbade all paid employment and cooperation with law enforcement and the state. Based on two decades of on-the-ground research, Galeotti’s captivating study details thevory’s journey to power from their early days to their adaptation to modern-day Russia’s free-wheeling oligarchy and global opportunities beyond.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 344p.

By Diego Gambetta

In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 346p.

By Pino Arlacchi and Don Antonio Calderone

The startling 1992 confessions of Antonino Calderone, a boss in the Sicilian Mafia, provide a behind-the-scenes look at la Cosa Nostra that reveals the Mafia's history, organization, and worldwide influence.

New York: William Morrow, 1993. 289p.

By John Dickie

Hailed in Italy as the best book ever written about the mafia in any language, Cosa Nostra is a fascinating, violent, and darkly comic account that reads like fiction and takes us deep into the inner sanctum of this secret society where few have dared to tread.In this gripping history of the Sicilian mafia, John Dickie uses startling new research to reveal the inner workings of this secret society with a murderous record. He explains how the mafia began, how it responds to threats and challenges, and introduces us to the real-life characters that inspired the American imagination for generations, making the mafia an international, larger than life cultural phenomenon. Dickie's dazzling cast of characters includes Antonio Giammona, the first "boss of bosses''; New York cop Joe Petrosino, who underestimated the Sicilian mafia and paid for it with his life; and Bernard "the Tractor" Provenzano, the current boss of bosses who has been hiding in Sicily since 1963.

New York; Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 400p.

By Bob Halloran

In August 2013, “Bac Guai" John Willis, also known as the “White Devil" because of his notorious ferocity, was sentenced to 20 years for drug trafficking and money laundering. Willis, according to prosecutors, was “the kingpin, organizer and leader of a vast conspiracy," all within the legendarily insular and vicious Chinese mafia.

It started when John Willis was 16 years old . . . his life seemed hopeless. His father had abandoned his family years earlier, his older brother had just died of a heart attack, and his mother was dying. John was alone, sleeping on the floor of his deceased brother's home. Desperate, John reached out to Woping, a young Chinese man Willis had rescued from a bar fight weeks before. Woping literally picks him up off the street, taking him home to live among his own brothers and sisters.

White Devil explores the workings of the Chinese mafia, and he speaks frankly about his relationships with other gang members, the crimes he committed, and why he’ll never rat out any of his brothers to the cops.

Dallas: BenBella Books, 2016. 320p.