ABSTRACT

In Situational Prevention: Successful Case Studies, Clarke (1997) outlined four main ways of reducing the opportunities for crime:

Within each of these four ways, he also identified four ‘opportunity-reducing techniques’, making 16 in all. In this chapter, we use this scheme to survey techniques that can be used to prevent e-commerce crime. Our purpose is not to classify every possible technique, but to demonstrate how readily the situational prevention approach can be applied to e-commerce crime. As we have noted in our introduction, it is a characteristic of situational crime prevention that it evolves and changes in response to new environments, particularly those environments that are directly affected by changes in technology. It is therefore not surprising that we have found it necessary to make some small changes to the scheme in order to encompass the full range of opportunity reducing techniques in the e-commerce environment. By the same token, we have found that not all the 16 techniques apply with equal force to e-commerce crime. For instance, the general absence of laws – and hence punishment – governing the Internet suggest that while it may not be difficult to think of ways to increase the perceived risks of e-commerce crime, this may not at present be as effective as with other crime. Of course, this situation could change as the Internet gradually becomes more subject to control and regulation (see Chapter 7).