Becoming a victim of cybercrime can cause several impacts. Current research has mostly focused on specific forms of cybercrime considering money and data loss as some of the consequences. While more and more individuals use the internet to meet strangers to communicate, interact and fall in love with. Research on cybercrimes such as webcam blackmail, sextortion and online romance scam has been mos
tly ignoring the interpersonal nature of these crime. Therefore, the impact of victimisation such as financial loss and theft of personal information are only half the truth. In my master thesis, I have focused on vulnerabilities and victimisation processes of webcam blackmail and online romance scam. I collected data in online forum and from discussion forums for 7 month, using participant observation as my research method. As my results show, mix forms between webcam blackmail and online romance scam exists. Nevertheless, the basic of nature of both considered online crimes are very different. Online romance scam is a crime, that has transformed from offline to online, originating from the romance letter scam. During the scam, the victim believes to have met the right person online, forming a relationship, developing rather quick feelings and showing the willingness to commitment (e.g. moving in together, adding the victim to benefits allowance, suggesting to marry one another). Most of the time, the scammer pretends to be in the military abroad. In most cases, a crisis was invented in order to ask for money in order to fix the crisis. In some cases, a third person called the victim in order to confirm the incident (e.g. accident, last mission, stuck at the customs, etc.). The victims were often double hit, loosing a great amount of money and experience the loss of their relationship. This crime is therefore, last-longing, generating rather big amounts of money and leaving their victims with emotional devastation, physical impacts and psychological issues. Webcam blackmail is, according to my research, a sub-category of sextortion. It is a pure cybercrime, only able to be committed because of the internet and its information communication technologies (ICTs). In contrast to online romance scam, webcam blackmail occurs when an individual accepts an offer to become very intimate on webcam. It is without any costs, lasts only a few minutes and the victims is being recorded without its knowledge. Victims are being put under a lot of pressure in order to comply and pay what is been asked of them.
