Responses from societal sectors in Sweden concerning the rise of cyberfraud: A quantitative document analysis using topic modelling

Sammanfattning

Fraud is a crime that causes severe economic damage, and crime rates are rising because of technological advancements. There is a research gap regarding how fraud crime prevention is organised and which actors are important for it. This thesis aimed to explore how the rising occurrence of cyber fraud is addressed on a societal level, using the civil, banking, governmental, and business sectors. It also aimed to explore how this could be placed in the framework of risk society, governmentality, and nodal governance. It used a computational method called topic modelling to analyse a larger collection of documents. This method resulted in topics describing the most central themes of the documents, and it showed which topic was more important for each sector and how the sectors and topics related to each other. The key findings described that fraud prevention is largely seen as an issue for the individual, as they have to be informed and aware to prevent their own victimisation. The civil sector thought it was important to keep the banking sector responsible for fraud prevention, and the banking sector is the most central actor in the fraud prevention network, as it has demands and expectations on itself from the other actors. The findings imply that a new kind of fraud prevention is necessary, as technological advancements have made finding the perpetrator difficult, space irrelevant, and the larger scope of the crimes makes traditional law enforcement inefficient.