Cybercrime is a diverse and growing problem, with investigations often involving multiple jurisdictions and experts such as law enforcement, IT specialists, and forensic accountants. Common offenses include fraud, phishing, identity theft, terrorism, and child pornography. Cybercrime investigations focus on the digital trail, often requiring experts to recover deleted files and make sense of complex financial transactions.
Cybercrime encompasses a wide variety and an ever-increasing range of crimes. Due to the different types of cyber crimes, the techniques and procedures used in cyber crime investigations are also varied. Often, cybercrime investigations involve law enforcement agencies in multiple jurisdictions. Traditional law enforcement investigators, forensic accountants, and information technology experts are all frequently involved in cybercrime investigations.
Common examples of offenses that may be classified as computer crimes or may have a cyber component include fraud, phishing and identity theft, as well as terrorism and child pornography. Crimes such as fraud and identity theft are often committed through phishing. “Phishing” is the term used to describe the illegal acquisition of personal information on the Internet. Cybercriminals often hack personal files or trick people into providing personal data and/or account information over the Internet, which they later use to make illegal purchases or transfer money from bank accounts.
In addition to identity and financial crimes, a cybercrime investigation can also target terrorist or child pornography activity on the Internet. Terrorists, like child pornography, often use the anonymity of the Internet to commit their crimes. The Internet also provides an endless supply of potential buyers of child pornography videos or photos.
Just like traditional crimes that leave a paper trail, cybercrimes often leave a digital trail. The first place to look in a cybercrime investigation, then, is to go the digital trail. All Internet correspondence or transactions must have a point of origin. Finding the origin of the communication or transaction is the job of law enforcement officials working in cybercrime investigations.
Cybercrime investigations often require detectives to sift through huge computer files trying to connect all the dots. Often the suspect attempted to delete incriminating files or communications. For this reason, information technology experts are often used to recover deleted files or communications from computers to ascertain what information the suspect was trying to hide.
Once the information has been located, a forensic accountant is often called upon to make sense of the information found when the crime is a financial crime. Cyber crimes such as fraud or embezzlement often involve very complex banking transactions that require an expert to understand and follow up. A forensic accountant is someone who is trained to uncover even the smallest inconsistency in financial records.
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