Computer crime

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 464.

Organized crime

Organized crime is one of the largest business enterprises in the advanced industrial societies. While the United Slates has long been deemed the center of organized crime, such activities also flourish in Canada, Japan, France, Great Britain, and other places with prosperous economies. Such profitable endeavors as gambling, drug trafficking, bookmaking, loan sharking, prostitution, protection schemes, labor racketeering, and the numbers racket have long been controlled by various organized crime factions. Most of these activities are local or national in scope, but the increasing use of drugs since 1965 has led to the establishment of international networks of crime in order to move drugs from one country to another, to process them, and to distribute the billions of dollars in profits that result from their sale.

Computer crime is a way to commit crime, not a type of crime. By the mid-1980s computers were in use in nearly every kind of commercial, financial, and industrial enterprise. As record-keeping devices computers are unsurpassed in the amount of information that can be kept on a readily available file. Credit-card companies, banks, savings and loan associations, insurance companies, credit bureaus, and many other institutions keep computerized customer files. This information is for the private and confidential use of the customer and the institution.

Access to such confidential information, as well as to the more complex computer systems operated by government agencies, has been gained by computer experts, often with the intent to defraud or embezzle. Someone working within a bank or other financial organization may easily gain access to the company's computers to transfer funds to his own or a friend's account or to another bank.

Owners of personal home computers, too, have found ways to break into company computer systems. To accomplish a break-in of this kind, a computer operator needs a modem, a device that will connect his computer by telephone to another computer system. He also needs to know how to access another system through its code. For the average person, this would be a very difficult task; but for someone well-versed in computer logic, it has proved relatively easy. According to an American Bar Association report in 1984, billions of dollars are being lost through computer theft each year.