A Survey of Cyber Crime in Greece Alexandros Papanikolaou, Vasileios Vlachos, Anastasios Papathanasiou, Konstantinos Chaikalis, Maria Dimou, and Magdalini Karadimou Abstract—During the past years, the Internet has evolved into the so-called “Web 2.0”. Nevertheless, the wide use of the offered Internet services has rendered individual users a potential target to cyber-criminals. The paper presents a review and analysis of various cyber crimes, based on the cases that were reported to the Cyber Crime and Computer Crime Unit of the Greek Police Force and compares them to similar data of other EU countries. Index Terms—Cyber crime, Greek cyber crime, EU cyber crime. I. I NTRODUCTION P ERSONAL computers, smart phones and mobile devices are ubiquitous in modern, technologically-advanced soci- eties. In addition, the expansion of the Internet and Web 2.0 has given citizens a vast variety of options and services, thus allowing communication and collaboration among them. On the other hand, the so-called cyberspace tends to be exploited by cyber criminals, who are able to attack their victims beyond any geographical constraints, as long as they are online. Thus, the wide proliferation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), in addition to the numerous positive effects to citizens and society in general, provided a new field of criminality in cyberspace. The term cyber crime integrates all these criminal activities that are made with the use of computers and the Internet, including economic frauds, child pornography, identity theft and intellectual property crimes. It is worth pointing out that in many cases the use of computers does not change the fundamental character of a crime. For instance, a bribery remains a bribery, regardless of how the money was transferred (electronically, in the case of cyber crime) and despite the fact that the use of a computer may affect the degree of the offence. Nevertheless, the introduc- tion of information and communication systems has certainly triggered a qualitative change. The Internet is attractive to technologically-savvy criminals because it provides them with the opportunity to locate and research their victims’ behaviour, widens their field of activity and offers them the potential to change their identity. More importantly, they can operate from another country, thus Corresponding Alexandros Papanikolaou, Vasileios Vlachos, Konstanti- nos Chaikalis and Magdalini Karadimou are with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Technological Educational Institute of Thessaly, Larissa, Greece (email: alxpapanikolaou@gmail.com, {vsvlachos, kchaikalis}@teilar.gr, m karadimou@hotmail.com). Anastasios Papathanasiou is with the Cyber Crime Prosecution Subdi- vision, Financial Police and Cyber Crime Unit, Hellenic Police (email: a.papathanasiou@cybercrimeunit.gr). Maria Dimou is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer- ing, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece (email: mdimou@inf.uth.gr). making their prosecution a complex matter, due to the different legal frameworks and the international procedures that should be followed in order to arrest them. Contrary to traditional crimes, the perpetrator and the victim are seldom in the same geographical location. Therefore, the law enforcement agencies face several difficulties in both investigating and closing such crime cases. Cyberspace is nowadays characterised as the fifth common domain (the others being land, sea, air and outer space) and is in great need for coordination, cooperation and legal measures among all nations [1], as cyber crimes tend to increase day by day, leading to soaring revenues for the criminals and lack of trust for Internet users. According to recent reports, over 80% of online shoppers cited security as a primary issue to worry about when conducting business over the Internet [2]. In Australia, cyber crime costs to businesses more than $600 million a year, while in the US one in five online consumers has been a victim of cyber crime in the last two years, equating to $8 billion [2]. Another report on cyber crime remarks 556 millions of users being manipulated each year, which in fact is more than the entire population of the European Union [3]. More alarmingly, less than half of all victims call their financial institution or the police and just over a third contact the website owner or email provider. A serious effort to combat these types of crimes would demand collaboration among countries and businesses, in order to form a common defence strategy to come into prominence and affront the problem in the best possible way. It is necessary to achieve a safe and reliable cyberspace environment in the context of an emerging information society to maximise the benefits of the ICT [1]. This paper is an extended version of the work presented in [4]. The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Sec- tion II looks at the related work and similar initiatives, both domestic and international. Section III presents and analyses the statistical data. Section IV discusses some aspects of cyber crime in relation to the presented statistical data. Section V briefly presents statistics related to cyber crime among EU countries, while Section VI concludes this paper with some remarks regarding the future direction of this research. II. RELATED WORK The importance of user education as a critical point in defeating cyber crime should not be neglected. The majority of Internet users do not know or are not well informed about the threats they may face. For instance, there is evidence that low self-control is a significant predictor of person-based