Discovering group-based transnational cyber fraud actives: A polymethodological view

Transnational cyber fraud is a threat to individuals, organizations, and governments all over the world. However, there is a scarcity of studies that investigate this increasingly perilous phenomenon in the field of information systems. Through a grounded approach using actual court sentencing records and in-depth investigations by television channels and in news reports, we advance a conceptual model to unveil the causes of transnational cyber fraud from a perspective of group-based crime development. We label the characteristics, psychologies, and behaviors of those who commit such fraud (henceforth referred to as “fraudsters”); divide the fraudsters' cyber fraud development into three stages, and include personal and environmental causes for cyber fraud. Further, using data from 1,082 fraudsters, extracted manually from 176 court judgments, we find empirical support for the key contributions of the model. Then, we discuss the implications of the model for ongoing research on cybersecurity and applications.