ABSTRACT
We have already referred to Clarke’s (1999) work in identifying consumer items that, because of their design, were more vulnerable to theft than other products. These he called ‘hot products’ and he described their criminogenic attributes with the acronym CRAVED (Clarke, 1999): Concealable, Removable, Available, Valuable, Enjoyable and Disposable. In later work, Clarke and Newman (2002) showed how a variety of consumer items might vary according to these criteria. For example, a refrigerator is not as removable or enjoyable as a piece of jewellery, but both are valuable and their disposability may depend on local circumstances such as the presence of a fence or willing buyer. In the previous chapter we argued that a prime ingredient of all products found in e-commerce was information, and that this ingredient was often the target of crime. Here we will extend this idea further to suggest that information itself may be thought of as a hot product by showing how it fits Clarke’s CRAVED descriptors.
