Cybercrime and the Limits of Criminological Theory: A Systematic Review and an Integrated Model

Criminology's principal theories were built for a world of streets, neighborhoods and face-toface encounters. Cybercrime tests the assumptions on which they rest: that offenders and targets meet in space, that identities can be observed, that guardians are mostly human, and that serious offending demands serious skill. This article asks how far established theories explain the emergence and changing forms of cybercrime, and what must be revised for them to do so. It reports a systematic review of the empirical and theoretical literature [N = 133 studies, 1999– 2024] and compares seven theories across four cybercrime types. Opportunity-based accounts have the strongest and most consistent support; social learning best explains initiation into skilled offending; strain and self-control receive partial support confined mainly to opportunistic and interpersonal offending; and deterrence is weakened by problems of attribution and jurisdiction. No theory is refuted, and none is sufficient. The article proposes the Digital Crime Opportunity Model (DCOM), which treats motivation, learning, opportunity, digital affordances and layered guardianship as jointly necessary conditions of a cybercriminal event, and it derives propositions for testing and implications for prevention.