This article aims to establish the particularities of cybercrime in Nigeria and whether these suggest problems with prevailing taxonomies of cybercrime. Nigeria is representative of the Sub-Saharan region, and an exemplary cultural context to illustrate the importance of incorporating social and contextual factors into cybercrime classifications. This paper anchors upon a basic principle of categorisation alongside motivational theories, to offer a tripartite conceptual framework for grouping cybercrime nexus. It argues that cybercrimes are motivated by three possible factors: socioeconomic, psychosocial and geopolitical. Whilst this contribution challenges the statistics relied on to inform the prevalence of cybercrime perpetrators across nations, it provides new ways of making sense of the voluminous variances of cybercrime. Concomitantly, it enables a clearer conceptualisation of cybercrime in Nigeria and elsewhere, because jurisdictional cultures and nuances apply online as they do offline

Do men and women perceive cybercrime types differently? This article draws on the distinction between socio-economic and psychosocial cybercrime proposed by Lazarus (2019) to investigate whether men and women hold different perceptions of digital crimes across these two dimensions. Informed by the synergy between feminist theory and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF), our survey examined respondents’ differential perceptions of socio-economic cybercrime (online fraud) and psychosocial cybercrime (cyberbullying, revenge porn, cyberstalking, online harassment) among men and women. The results revealed that women considered psychosocial cybercrime worse than men. Conversely, we found no differences between men and women with regard to socio-economic cybercrime. The article concludes that psychosocial cybercrimes are more gendered than socio-economic cybercrime, suggesting problems with the meaning of ‘cyber-enabled crimes’ and substantiating the synergy between the TCF and feminist perspectives.

This article is about the manifestations of similarities between two seemingly distinct groups of Nigerians: cybercriminals and politicians. Which linguistic strategies do Twitter users use to express their opinions on cybercriminals and politicians? The study undertakes a qualitative analysis of ‘engaged’ tweets of an elite law enforcement agency in West Africa. We analyzed and coded over 100,000 ‘engaged’ tweets based on a component of mechanisms of moral disengagement (i.e., advantageous comparison), a linguistic device. The results reveal how respondents defend the actions of online fraudsters (“the deviant group”) by strategically comparing them to the wrongful acts of corrupt politicians (“the respectable group”). Similarly, the results show how respondents positioned this linguistic strategy to compare “the powerless group” (online fraudsters) and “the powerful group” (politicians) in society. Indeed, tweet responses suggest that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) generally looks downwards for culprits (i.e., online fraudsters) while ignoring fraudulent politicians. We conclude that the process by which some actions are interpreted as a crime compared to others is a moral enterprise.