Social and contextual taxonomy of cybercrime: Socioeconomic theory of Nigerian cybercriminals

Abstract

This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these suggest problems with prevailing taxonomies of cybercrime. Nigeria is representative of the Sub-Saharan region, and an exemplary cultural context to illustrate the importance of incorporating social and contextual factors into cybercrime classifications. This paper anchors upon a basic principle of categorisation alongside motivational theories, to offer a tripartite conceptual framework for grouping cybercrime nexus. It argues that cybercrimes are motivated by three possible factors: socioeconomic, psychosocial and geopolitical. Whilst this contribution challenges the statistics relied on to inform the prevalence of cybercrime perpetrators across nations, it provides new ways of making sense of the voluminous variances of cybercrime. Concomitantly, it enables a clearer conceptualisation of cybercrime in Nigeria and elsewhere, because jurisdictional cultures and nuances apply online as they do offline.