Organised crime encompasses a broad range of activities and people, from peasants in Colombia to transnational corporate actors. Due to the diversity of actors, a global analysis of organised crime does not allow us to understand its different workings. Moreover, some activities are still poorly documented. In order to fill these gaps, Federico Varese, a professor of sociology at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics and specialist of mafias, proposes a new framework that distinguishes three key activities of organised crime groups: production, trade and governance.
Based on extensive data collection, he wants to find out whether or not those functions overlap and shed light on how groups specialised in one function differ from those with other specialisations. This is the ambition of the CRIMGOV project (2021–2026) for which he has received support from the European Research Council highly selective Advanced Grants programme.

The World Cybercrime Index (WCI), released in 2024, identifies the world’s key cybercrime hotspots. It measures the significance of the cybercrime produced in different countries, and then ranks these countries according to their “cybercriminality”: the impact of the cybercrimes produced there, and the skills of the cybercriminals who commit these crimes. The WCI is the first index to use expert survey data to map cybercrime geography.

The Index was developed as a joint partnership between the University of Oxford and UNSW Canberra, and was partly funded by the CRIMGOV Project and ERC Advanced Grant based at the University of Oxford and Sciences Po. It was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Co-authors include Dr Miranda Bruce from the University of Oxford and UNSW Canberra, Associate Professor Jonathan Lusthaus from the University of Oxford’s Department of Sociology and Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, Professor Federico Varese from Sciences Po in France, Professor Ridhi Kashyap from the University of Oxford, and Professor Nigel Phair from Monash University.

To develop it, the co-authors of the study conducted a survey with 92 of the world’s top experts in cybercrime intelligence and investigations in 2021. These experts nominated up to five countries they believed were the most significant sources of five different cybercrime types – Technical products/services, Attacks and extortion, Scams, Data/identity theft, and Cashing out/money laundering. Experts then rated each country they nominated according to the impact of their cybercrimes, and the technical and professional skills of the cybercriminals who operate there. The co-authors then used this data to generate the World Cybercrime Index.

The WCI has been featured in more than 200 news items across the world, including national newspaper and magazine outlets, ABC News Radio in Australia, and "Somewhere on Earth: the Global Tech Podcast" in the UK.

Russia leads the list of countries that host cybercrime, followed by Ukraine, China, the USA, Nigeria and Romania, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. The findings come from anonymous questionnaires completed by ninety-two cybercrime experts. The researchers say this survey approach overcomes a major challenge in investigating cybercrime - the anonymity of perpetrators who conceal their identities online. Dr Miranda Bruce, from the University of Oxford and New South Wales is lead author and is on show.