How Do Consumers React to Cybercrime ?

We conduct a secondary analysis of data collected to survey EU citizens' experiences and concerns with cybercrime. We devise a series of logistic regressions that measure how exposure to cybercrime can inhibit online banking, shopping and other activities. We consider three forms of exposure: directly falling victim, expressing concern about security, and reading news reports. We find that directly experiencing cybercrime decreases the likelihood of shopping and banking online by 4-5 percentage points. We find that expressing concern about cybercrime has nearly twice as much negative impact on online behavior than directly experiencing cybercrime. People who have not heard anything about cybercrime in news reports or from colleagues are more likely to bank online than those who have heard such reports. We conclude by reviewing limitations of existing survey approaches and make recommendations for improving questions in future cybercrime surveys.