Digitalization of Crime and Criminal Law

Abstract

Russia's entry into the era of the information society entailed a significant transformation of the economy, the ways people communicate, the nature of social ties, which could not but affect crime. Representatives of the criminal community adopted quickly new information and communication technologies and moved a significant part of their illegal activities to the online space, as a result of which crime acquired qualitatively new characteristics. Digitalization has changed not only the qualitative parameters, but also the scale of crime. Crimes in the field of computer information in their volumes are many times higher (by how many orders of magnitude) than all other types of crimes taken together. Digitalization processes have had a significant impact on traditional segments of crime, including mercenary crime. In most cases, the object of mercenary encroachments is no longer things (including cash), but non-cash funds. And with the development, complexity and diversification of digital financial and quasi-financial turnover, new types of "disembodied" assets are becoming increasingly the subject of theft - cryptocurrency, consumer loyalty bonuses, virtual objects used by players in multiplayer online games. In accordance with this, the methods of theft are transformed inevitably. Illegal access to legally-protected computer information, malicious computer programs, and social engineering methods are used to steal non-cash money and intangible financial assets. Thus, the digitalization of the global economy and Russian society has changed radically the criminal landscape, the scale, structure and qualitative characteristics of crime. In fact, the criminal law should respond promptly to the ongoing transformations, properly take into account the new criminal reality, adapt to it, create new and adapt existing tools to counter illegal activities. However, the current criminal legislation clearly lags behind modern crime trends, which reduces its preventive and protective potential. The author comes to the disappointing conclusion that the adaptation of criminal legislation and law enforcement practice to counteract digital crime is slow, inconclusive and contradictory, showing the relevant problems on exact examples. From the author's point of view, modern criminological reality requires a change in the vectors of criminal policy, transformation of basic criminal law provisions and institutions, clarification of existing criminal law prohibitions and criminalization of new socially dangerous acts, i.e. a full-scale reform of criminal law.