Scripting OC in the ESociety: Identifying a New Structure of Online Criminal Opportunities for Offline Transit Crimes

An increasing number of news media and investigative reports underline that the Internet facilitates traditional transnational organised crimes and in particular transit crimes, ranging from sex trafficking to trade in counterfeit products. However, these sources do not to pay enough attention to the modalities and the extent to which this is true: it is not easy to distinguish between new stereotypes and what is actually going on. In order to understand the role the Internet plays in these criminal activities - and consequently to develop preventive measure to inform the public policy agenda - situational approaches can provide a proper framework: indeed, by studying event decisions and the details of crime commission, situational prevention offers a practical guidance on strategies to reduce criminal opportunities. After a brief presentation of the principles of script analysis and of the scripting model used in this work, this paper shows how script analysis can effectively serve as a tool to investigate what kind of criminal opportunities the Internet offers for certain organised criminal activities to happen and how these opportunities affect their organisation.