SCARSSCARS SCARS - Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc. A government registered crime victims' assistance & crime prevention nonprofit organization based in Miami, Florida, U.S.A. SCARS supports the victims of scams worldwide and through its partners in more than 60 countries around the world. Incorporated in 2015, its team has 30 years of continuous experience educating and supporting scam victims. Visit www.AgainstScams.org to learn more about SCARS.™ Research: Socio-Economic Theory of Nigerian Cybercriminals

This paper sets out with the aim of developing and improving upon existing taxonomies used in cybercrimeCybercrime Cybercrime is a crime related to technology, computers, and the Internet. Typical cybercrime are performed by a computer against a computer, or by a hacker using software to attack computers or networks. scholarship.

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1. Introduction

Listed in prevalence of cybercrime perpetrators, Nigeria, the UK and the USA (in ascending order of significance) are on top of the ‘league table’ (ICCC, 2006, ICCC, 2008, ICCC, 2009, ICCC, 2010). Considering Nigeria as an exemplary social context – representing the Sub-Saharan world region – this article will emphasize the need to incorporate social and contextual factors into the classification schemas. Whilst the establishing of the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria will concomitantly suggest problems with prevailing taxonomies of cybercrime, it will also render problematic, the basis for ICCC, 2006, ICCC, 2008, ICCC, 2009, ICCC, 2010 claim on the prevalence of cybercrime perpetrators.

Whilst cybercrime primarily operates in the realm of cyberspace, terrestrial crimes operate in physical spaces (Manjikian, 2010). Seeking to summarise and encapsulate various conceptualizations within cybercrime literature, Yazdanifard et al. (2011) defined ‘cybercrime’ as ‘any type of intentional criminalCriminal A criminal is any person who through a decision or act engages in a crime. This can be complicated, as many people break laws unknowingly, however, in our context, it is a person who makes a decision to engage in unlawful acts or to place themselves with others who do this. A criminal always has the ability to decide not to break the law, or if they initially engage in crime to stop doing it, but instead continues. scheme that is computer or/and internet-mediated’. However, whilst such a description describes a wide spectrum of cybercrime, it fails to account for the dual model of criminal schemes within ¹cyberspace. Ogwezzy (2012, p.91) elaborated that the term ‘cybercrime’ implies “offenses committed through the use of the computer in contrast to ‘computer crime’ which refers to offenses against the computer and data or program therein”. Whilst the computer and its content are the primary targets in computer crimes, the meaning of cybercrime is wrapped around the use of a computer or/and the Internet to commit age-old crimes (Ogwezzy, 2012, McGuire and Dowling, 2013).