The interactions between an offender and a victim, at one point in time, were almost strictly face-to-face. That was a very long time ago. Crimes such as burglary or vandalism are not necessarily face-to-face but involved the offender being within the victim’s personal space to commit such a crime. In today’s world, a plethora of crimes happen to people who might not even know they have been slighted until their bank notifies them or they open their computer to see a ransomware popup. In these cases, the perpetrator likely doesn’t even know who their victim is on a personal level and they are just acting opportunistically to try to profit. Before cyber technology, many crimes were committed by somebody who was taking advantage of people they had a personal connection to. Political corruption I the 1890s is an easy example, because these politicians put up a façade for their constituents, and said they would do one thing while they really did another in order to line their pockets. The interactions between offenders and victims nowadays are often very minimal or one-sided. The victim is often not interacting at all or using a go-between, like a bank’s fraud department, in order to interact with the offender. Even in the case of credit card fraud, the offender has already interacted with the victim, and the victim is just doing cleanup for their own account and not interacting with the offender in any meaningful way. As cyber technology has advanced, the ability for offenders to succeed in their efforts without ever having to look their victim in the eye or speak to them at all has also gone up. Likewise, the ability for victims to get a situation mitigated without having to confront their offender is also much easier and has allowed for crimes like credit card fraud to become almost normalized and expected in society.
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