Samenvatting

This article discusses the results of a Dutch study that focuses specifically on victimization of various forms of cybercrimes among civilians. The survey addresses the cybercrimes hacking, fraud through selling and auction websites, identity theft and fraud and advanced fee fraud. The results are based on a validated questionnaire which was posted amongst a representative sample of 21,800 citizens, the response rate was 10,314 (47 per cent). In this article of each of these cybercrimes the prevalence is shown. Concerning prevalence, the victim survey shows that in the twelve months preceding the survey 4.3 percent of all Internet users were victims of hacking, 2.4 percent were victims of online scams (by paying for a good or service but not receiving them), 0.8 percent were victims of identity fraud and 0.2 percent of advanced fee fraude. Of all victims, 11.9 percent was victim of more than one of the cybercrimes we studied for this article. If we compare this with figures of offline crime we see that in the Netherlands in 2010, 1 percent were victims of assault, 1.2 percent of burglary and 1.5 percent of sexual offenses. In comparison with these offline crimes, the cybercrimes in our study have significant numbers of victims. Among Internet users, we see that victims of hacking and fraud by auction or selling sites are more often youngsters than older people (for hacking 15 till 35 years in fraud 15 till 25 years), people without a partner are at higher risk than people with partners and people with indicated that their most recently completed education were low are more at risk than people with high education. Especially with the online fraud this is remarkable, because it appears that people who make the most purchases over the Internet are higher educated and mostly in 25 till 45 years old.