Work, prey, love: a critical analysis of Estonian cybercrime case law 2014-2019

Abstract

The current study takes a closer look at the people behind the ‘cybercrime’ moniker in Estonia. Following a socio-legal research approach, qualitative content analysis and systematic legal interpretation were used to analyse N=42 Estonian court judgements and decisions delivered between 01.01.2014 and 10.08.2019. The results show relative uniformity in crimes involving multiple perpetrators, where the primary distinguishing factor was the level of technical sophistication of the crimes. Crimes committed by individual perpetrators exhibited more variation, ranging from low-tech account takeovers perpetrated by broken-hearted ex-partners to active use of malware and signals jamming. The systematic legal analysis showed that the current system of cybercrime provisions in the Estonian Penal Code is unnecessarily scattered, because the substantive differences between the provisions are insignificant and do not adequately reflect the inherent characteristics of cybercrime. The article thus calls into question whether the legislator has taken the easy road by mechanically adopting international instruments (Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime and Directive 2013/40/EU) into domestic criminal law.