Interestingly, recent studies have shown that 70% of Singaporeans fall victim to cyber crimes. Worst still, 71% do not expect these online outlaws to be brought to justice.
Instead of stealing massive amounts, these outlaws steal very little amounts from you on many different occasions, making it extremely difficult to track them down.
Cyber Crime activities in Singapore include
• Fraud
• Spamming
• Hacking
• Intellectual property theft
• Identity theft
• Harassment
As the chart shows, the most common form of cyber crime activity in Singapore is hacking. This includes writing of spreading computer viruses and worms and flooding websites with denial of service attacks.
Gender
It is not a big surprise that guys are more deviant than ladies when it comes to being a nuisance online. Your perpetrator is ten times more likely to be a male than female as statistics show. I am unsurprised by this fact as Albert Bandura has showed that boys are more predisposed to aggressive acts than females. If we think about it, cyber-crime may also be considered as an aggressive act supporting the Bandura model
Educational Level
Addtionally, it isn’t surprising that almost ¾ of the people that commit cyber-crimes either have a undergraduate degree or diploma. This may be because of the dynamic and more complex learning strategies acquired in the undergraduate programs as compared to the more rigid ITE and Secondary school learning styles where. Hence, more intuitive and deeper levels of thought may combined with the thirst for virtual “excitement” resulting into cyber misdeeds.
Why is Singapore a target for cyber criminals?
Sometimes, being an affluent nation doesn’t really help. You become the target of an increasing array of scams, tricks, lies and deception. Before this post, a friend told me about his experience with an online British scam. What was comical was that my friend knew right from the start about the ploy and started toying with the person just to taunt him. I thought that was quite hilarious.
Before you go, please take a look at this video. Its only 2 minutes long and shows the victim actually witnesses his computer being hacked into at that particular moment. Imagine seeing your mouth move and clicking on icons without anyone dealing with the keyboard! It served as an eye-opener for me. ENJOY!
