Measuring the Influence of Perceived Cybercrime Risk on Online Service Avoidance

Cybercrime is a pervasive threat for today's Internet-dependent society. While the real extent and economic impact is hard to quantify, scientists and officials agree that cybercrime is a huge and still growing problem. A substantial fraction of cybercrime's overall costs to society can be traced to indirect opportunity costs, resulting from unused online services. This paper presents a parsimonious model that builds on technology acceptance research and insights from criminology to identify factors that reduce Internet users' intention to use online services. We hypothesize that avoidance of online banking, online shopping and online social networking is increased by cybercrime victimization and media reports. The effects are mediated by the perceived risk of cybercrime and moderated by the user's confidence online. We test our hypotheses using a structural equation modeling analysis of a representative pan-European sample. Our empirical results confirm the negative impact of perceived risk of cybercrime on the use of all three online service categories and support the role of cybercrime experience as an antecedent of perceived risk of cybercrime. We further show that more confident Internet users perceive less cybercriminal risk and are more likely to use online banking and online shopping, which highlights the importance of consumer education.