The interactions between traditional offenders and victims generally require the offender and victim to be within close proximity to one another. Whether the offender intends to steal, harass, or physically harm the victim, they could not do it without entering their space in some capacity. This also means that, for the most part, victims will know when they are being victimized. However, with the creation of cyber technology, not only is this physical proximity no longer required, but victims can be victimized long after the initial crime has taken place.

To begin with, cyber crimes such as identity theft often go unnoticed by the victim until there is a problem. Additionally, the offender does not need to go into the home of the victim or go onto their laptop: they can steal that information through password theft or harmful email links. For individuals and organizations alike, it is possible to go months or even years without realizing that your information was stolen. At no point did the offender or victim ever have to interact with each other, yet victimization still clearly occurred.

Next, in crimes involving cyber harassment or stalking, cyber technology has created a new hyper-interactive avenue for the offenders to harass victims. Offenders can harass the victim(s) through social media, email, phone calls and text messages, or by doxxing them. It can get to the point where the victim has to try and completely remove their online presence in order to get away from the harassment. Even when that happens, harassment can take place off of the sites the victim uses. For victims who have had images spread online, those images live on forever in forums, on websites, and on hard drives. In these situations, the offender has interacted with the victim a handful of times, but can continue victimizing them for as long as they choose.

Finally, the clearance rates of traditional crimes vary depending on what the crime was. With the addition of cyber technology and little, if any, non-digital forensic evidence, offenders can often continue to offend without any repercussions. This is especially true in instances where the crime is not noticed until long after it has occurred. Further, legislation has yet to catch up to where cyber technology stood 20 years ago, let alone today. This creates an environment where offenders never have to interact with their victims and face consequences in a court of law. Overall, cyber technology has created ways for offenders to never have to interact with victims and created opportunities for offenders to perpetually interact with and torment them. Rather than creating new forms of crimes, it places another tool in the criminal toolbox to act out traditional ones.

Hazelwood, S.D. & Koon-Magnin, S., Cyber Stalking and Cyber Harassment Legislations in the United States: A Qualitative Analysis. International Journal of Cyber Criminology