PROJECT TITLE :

Measuring the Influence of Perceived Cybercrime Risk on Online Service Avoidance

ABSTRACT:

Cybercrime may be a pervasive threat for today's Internet-dependent society. While the important extent and economic impact is hard to quantify, scientists and officers agree that cybercrime could be a huge and still growing downside. A substantial fraction of cybercrime's overall costs to society will be traced to indirect opportunity prices, resulting from unused on-line services. This paper presents a parsimonious model that builds on technology acceptance research and insights from criminology to spot factors that cut back Internet users' intention to use online services. We hypothesize that avoidance of on-line banking, online searching and online social networking is increased by cybercrime victimization and media reports. The consequences are mediated by the perceived risk of cybercrime and moderated by the user's confidence on-line. We tend to test our hypotheses using a structural equation modeling analysis of a representative pan-European sample. Our empirical results confirm the negative impact of perceived risk of cybercrime on the employment of all three on-line service classes and support the role of cybercrime experience as an antecedent of perceived risk of cybercrime. We tend to further show that additional assured Internet users understand less cybercriminal risk and are additional seemingly to use online banking and on-line shopping, that highlights the importance of consumer education.