Maritime crime and Africa 

Cybercrime has been evolving and spreading across the globe, and tools and environments are becoming available online allowing for new types of crime or expanding and upscaling traditional crime (NCA Strategic Industry Group, 2016). There are three reasons for this project approach. Related issues are international, however, we focus on Africa in our approach, for the following reasons.  

• First, Africa has been attributed to serve as the source of various types of cybercrime (Quarshie & Martin-Odoom, 2012). This has societal, reputational and economic impacts on African countries. 
• Second, African economies are developing fast, often faster than the establishment of adequate cyber security maturity levels (von Solms, 2015) and, thus, become targets (Kshetri, 2019).  
• Third, maritime cyber incidents are being increasingly observed worldwide (Fitton et al., 2015). Out of the 55 African countries, 39 have access to the sea and even landlocked countries are heavily dependent on maritime transport to reach global markets (UNCTAD, 2020).  

Predatory behaviours & criminal profiling  

Many factors explain the phenomena of cybercrime and online predatory behaviours which constitute offenses. We target a range of offenses, namely, sexual cyber predators, terrorists, online extremists with a focus on radicalisation, and organised crime. In this exploration, it is important to examine how and why perpetrators commit crimes from a human behavioural and psychological standpoint. The interaction between humans and technology and how this can lead to predatory crimes is one of the aims of the study. 

• Konstantinos Mersinas (ISG) 
• Pessima Yarjah (PhD student, ISG) 
• Maria Bada (Queen Mary)

The project is supported by London Met Police and the Pan-African Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Alexandria, Egypt; Dr Konstantinos Mersinas is part of the Patriarchate’s Human Rights Committee.