Thomas Holt

Michigan State University | MSU · School of Criminal Justice

The internet has become a popular marketplace for the sale of illicit products, including stolen personal information, drugs, and firearms. Many of these products are acquired using cryptocurrencies, which are generally defined as forms of digital currency that is traceable through blockchain ledger technology. These currencies are thought to be mo...

The development of the Internet and e-commerce tools have simplified the process of commercial exchange for both legal and illicit goods. The rise of online markets for illicit goods enable access to facilitatory resources for crime, such as firearms and counterfeit identity documents. Few have considered how these online markets facilitate the sal...

Over the last twenty years, researchers have noted the range of violent and financial crimes performed by racial and ethnically-motivated actors. There is also substantial evidence demonstrating the ways that these actors utilize the Internet and various online communications platforms as a resource to recruit others and coordinate criminal activit...

Past research on intimate partner violence (IPV) has examined physical, sexual, emotional/psychological, and financial forms of abuse and its impacts on people within harmful relationships. However, there is a lack of research on the impact of cyberfinancial abuse on people experiencing IPV. This paper presents the experiences and effect of cyberfi...

Although geographic information systems (GIS) are popular tools for investigations and resource deployment/management within law enforcement agencies, the utility of software programs like Esri’s ArcGIS mapping software to identify vulnerable areas or populations to prevent or mitigate the impact of crime is rarely explored within the field. What i...

Criminologists have recently explored online cybercrime-as-service markets where offenders offer hacking tools and services for a fee. So-called “stresser” or “booter” markets offering distributed reflective denial of service (DRDoS) attacks have been a recent target of international law enforcement action. Few have explored the ways in which these...

This chapter summarizes the emerging trends in the empirical literature on right-wing extremists’ use of the Internet. These trends are organized into five core uses identified by (Conway, 2006): information provision, networking, recruitment, financing, and information gathering. Highlighted throughout this chapter are key gaps in the empirical li...

The online presence of incels, or involuntary celibates, has been an increasing security concern for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in recent years, given that self-identified incels – including Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger – used the Internet to disseminate incel ideology and manifestos prior to committing acts of violence. Howev...

Western law enforcement agencies have made multiple arrests targeting individuals purchasing firearms on Dark Web platforms in recent years, as these transactions may violate national laws and facilitate offline violence. Despite its market presence and growth, research exploring these online illicit markets has been scant, especially as it relates...

Despite recent growths in research exploring the nature and scope of the online illicit marketplace, there has been a dearth of criminological inquiry examining both the chronological and functional steps offenders use to exchange illegal firearms online. As a result, it is unclear what role and function active market participants have within the o...

Big data, generally defined as voluminous datasets that cannot be processed by traditional information technology within a tolerable time, is increasingly used by both industry personnel and academic researchers to examine various trends that can support and/or challenge wider assumptions. The benefits of analyzing big data rests in its ability to...

We live in a pre-crime society. Within this society, information technology strategies and techniques such as predictive policing, actuarial justice and surveillance penology are used to achieve hyper-securitization. However, such securitization comes at a cost. In this new people-making society, the criminalisation of everyday life is guaranteed,...

Introduction The growth of digital technology has created opportunities for individuals to interact and share information in real-time using any combination of text, image and video (Wall, 2001; Newman & Clarke, 2003; Holt & Bossler, 2016; Lee & Holt, 2020). There are now vast quantities of data generated from humans’ use of various technologies, p...

This study applies routine activities theory to determine whether the characteristics of jihadi-inspired web defacements in the United States vary from all other defacements performed against IP addresses hosted within the United States from 2012 to 2016. We focus on target suitability variables and use a sample of over 2.2 million defacements repo...

Longitudinal criminological studies greatly improved our understanding of the longitudinal patterns of criminality. These studies, however, focused almost exclusively on traditional types of offending and it is therefore unclear whether results are generalizable to online types of offending. This study attempted to identify the developmental trajec...

Social scientists have long been interested in the motives of hackers, particularly financially motivated attackers. This article analyzes web defacements, a less studied and more public form of cyberattack, in which the content of a web page is deliberately substituted with unwanted text and graphics chosen by the perpetrator. These attacks use a...

Over the last two decades, researchers explored various aspects of the operational practices of online illicit market operations through the Open and Dark Web for various physical and digital goods. Far less work has considered the presence of counterfeit identity documents for sale within these markets, or the process of advertising, purchasing, p...

Web defacement is a form of hacking that involves altering the content of a website, resulting in repairs to the website code, loss of revenue, internal loss of productivity, and reputational damage. Limited research has examined the frequency of web defacements, the factors that distinguish them from other hacking motives, and the extent to which...

The theoretical literature from criminology, social movements, and political sociology, among others, includes diverging views about how political outcomes could affect movements. Many theories argue that political defeats motivate the losing side to increase their mobilization while other established models claim the winning side may feel encourag...

The twelve papers in this special section focus on the topic of cybercrimes. These computer crimes reflect the evolution of criminal practices that have adapted to the world of information and communication technologies. Cybercriminality has become a curse of the modern world with the potential to affect every one nationally and/or internationally....