ESTIMATING VALIDITY OF OFFICIAL CRIME STATISTICS VIA VICTIMIZATION SURVEYS (RCVS 2018, 2021): CASE OF ONLINE PROPERTY CRIME

Abstract

Аbstract. The article compares official statistics on registered and investigated online property crime and the results of victimization surveys in 2018 and 2021. Both data sources show that in Russia during the COVID19 pandemic, the number of property crimes committed remotely through computer or telephone networks has increased. Assessing the results of the victimization survey revealed that the scale of the phenomenon in official data is greatly underestimated. This is explained both by the high level of dark figure of crime (more than half of the people who reported material damage in surveys did not report it to the police) and by the grey figure of crime, when less than a fifth of statements are registered. The author comes to the conclusion that in Russia, official data on property crime only partially reflects the scale of the new trend towards replacing “traditional” thefts and facetoface frauds with the same types of crime, but committed online.