Discussion questions for academic study

Advances in electronic communication have made it significantly easier for white-collar criminals to commit fraud. The crux of this point is based on the fact that virtually all aspects of electronic communication are stored and accessible to someone, somewhere. Anything a person does on the internet or via the telephone -- whether mobile or conventional phones -- is recorded and is able to be tracked. Thus, white-collar criminals simply need to gain access to this data since it is available in abundant amounts. Once they are able to access that data, they can successfully leverage relevant aspects of it to their advantage. For instance, they can take a credit card number and make purchases.

If I were a swindler I could use the increasing reliance on electronic communication to my advantage by breaching the secure information of a retail store such as Target and accessing credit cards, and using them to make fraudulent purchases. These advances in electronic communication can possibly help law enforcement to fight these same types of crime. For example, law enforcement personnel are able to track down virtually every move of a swindler who is attempting to utilize the internet for the purposes of security breaches and credit card theft. However, these advances can also help law enforcement to simply monitor the habits of individual members of society under the pretense of helping to prevent crime, such as terrorist activities. Nonetheless, the Edward Snowden revelations reveal the fact that whether or not law enforcement entities are monitoring electronic communication for the aforementioned purpose, they can also effectively monitor the habits and activities of nearly everyone. As such, there are ramifications for the Fourth Amendment and for issues of privacy that are associated with such widespread monitoring. Even those who are not committing or contemplating committing crimes are punished in this regard.

Yes, I have heard of the email scam in which a member of the royal family of Nigeria has attempted to contact me, so such a scam definitely sounds familiar. However, there are other ones as well. There is another frequently found example of email fraud or some form of identity theft in which individuals will hack into someone's personal email account and have access to those emails. Then, that same person will begin sending emails to people who are in that persons contact list. Or, he or she will simply find people who the person whose email they hacked into has received an email from or sent an email to, and begin sending them fraudulent emails.