Criminological Profile of Cyber Offenders

Criminal profiling, as a relatively new technique, aims to involve criminologists, psychologists, and law enforcement officers to depict potential characteristics of dangerous offenders by assessing formers convicts, observing crime scenes, and interviewing victims so as to identify probable offenders. It is obvious that this technique can not accurately identify the offenders yet it limits the boundaries of possible suspects and helps law enforcement officers to identify the real criminal. The only probable and rational use of this technique relates to highly dangerous crimes and easier recognition of hardly detectable criminals. Therefore, it may also be applied to identify cyber criminals. In order to criminal profiling, it is possible to take advantages from focusing on two main indicators of behavioral presupposition of future offenders: First, to create a background of demographic, social, psychological and behavioral characteristics of cyber criminals; second, to analyze the collected data. In case of being properly analyzed, it can help profiler to gain an insight of the offenders; therefore, not only the collected data leads to identification of the offenders, but also it prevents delinquency. In this article, for reasons which will be referenced, the authors focus on social and demographic characteristics of cyber criminals and their motives. This article whose achievements are based on the study of cyber crime offenders and convicts in Iran, indicates that the cyber offenders like other offenders generally do not form a group of homogenous. However, there are some characteristics displayed stereotypically and without scientific support, may be prominently observed in cyber criminals (Hacker) and cyber.