Problems of electronic funds theft investigation

Abstract

The number of thefts of electronic funds is growing each year. Regretfully this trend is observed not only in Russia but also in several foreign countries. Another surge in remote theft and fraud was triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, during which both large corporations and individual citizens became victims of cyberattacks. Scientists and various Internet sources note that today criminals are constantly developing new schemes for committing theft of electronic funds and are one step ahead of law enforcement. Since the number of crimes under consideration is increasing, and their detection rate remains extremely low, it can be assumed that the existing method of investigating electronic funds theft is not effective enough. In our opinion, to improve the situation, it is first of all necessary to identify the range of main problems that law enforcement officers face when investigating such crimes. By analyzing investigative practice, scientific literature, documents, and materials published on various websites, we have identified some of them and conditionally divided them into two groups that cannot be considered in isolation from each other: organizational problems (lack of interaction between departments of different countries, problems of the appointment and execution of computertechnical examinations, long time for obtaining information that has evidentiary value, the low competence of law enforcement officers and their minor experience of working with specific sources of evidentiary information, etc.) and problems directly related to the investigation of electronic funds theft, with the main one being the problem of establishing the crime scene.

Keywords

• electronic funds
• cybercrime
• internet fraud
• investigation