ABSTRACT
This chapter examines both historical and contemporary changes in criminal opportunities, the skills needed to exploit them, and the consequences for men who lack these skills. The attractive criminal opportunities of one place/time can be transformed or even disappear in a few short years. Widespread availability and use of consumer credit, telecommunications, and electronic financial transactions have hastened the approach of a cashless economy and a veritable explosion of new, lucrative, low-risk criminal opportunities. The massive growth of consumer credit and computer-based electronic transactions, coupled with an enormous expansion of government largesse for wealthy and poor alike and mass marketing of insurance, have generated a host of criminal opportunities, primarily for fraud. For ambitious, imaginative, and intelligent offenders unable or unwilling to exploit new criminal opportunities, there are other options, in particular entrepreneurial crime. It is often supposed that the area of crime thieves specialize in distinguishes various categories of them and can be used for analytic and policy purposes.
