Cybercrime Victims Face ‘Massive Unmet Need’ for Support, Research Institute Says

The scale of cybercrime and the number of victims it creates mean law enforcement is struggling to keep up, a parliamentary inquiry has been told.

The Australian Institute of Criminology's Research Manager Anthony Morgan, and Deputy Director Rick Brown, appear before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement in Canberra, Australia, on Jun. 11, 2026. Screenshot from parliamentary proceedings

A parliamentary inquiry into capability of law enforcement to respond to cybercrime has been told there is a “massive unmet need” for support among Australians affected by cybercrime due to the sheer volume of offences and the large number of people targeted.

According to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s (AIC) most recent survey in 2024, about 47 percent of the population reported being victims of cybercrime in the previous 12 months, while two-thirds said they had experienced some form of cybercrime during their lifetime.

“To put that into context, if you think about a problem like motor vehicle crime or break-in, these are two issues that the public would [want] something being done about,” AIC Deputy Director Rick Brown told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement.

“But only 0.6 percent of households experience a vehicle crime in a year and only 1.8 percent experience a break-in.

“So you put ... what was traditionally called volume crime against cybercrime, and I think there’s a massive unmet need there. And that’s not a criticism of law enforcement, it’s just the reality of us dealing with the scale of the problem that we’re facing.”

Some Groups More Likely to Become Victims

AIC research also showed that the risk of falling victim to cybercrime is not evenly distributed across the population, Brown said.

Young people, Indigenous Australians and people with disability were particularly vulnerable to all four major forms of cybercrime—online abuse and harassment, malware, identity crime and misuse, and online fraud and scams.

Men were more likely than women to be the victims of online abuse and harassment and malware, while people who identify as LGBT+ were significantly more likely than heterosexual respondents to have been a victim of online abuse and harassment, and fraud and scams.

And people who mainly spoke a language other than English at home were more likely to have been a victim of online abuse and harassment, malware, and fraud and scams.

“What we find is that—as is always the case with all crime—it’s not universally distributed,” Brown told the committee.

“We think about it from a social demographic perspective, but we’ve also looked at it from a harm perspective. Last year, we published a cybercrime harm index, where we looked at 17 different types of cybercrime [and] looked at 34 different sorts of harms, and we were able to actually identify which particular types of cybercrime cause the most harm.”

Greatest Harm Comes from Three Types of Cybercrime

Brown also highlighted three types of cybercrime that cause the greatest harm to the community.

“Of the top three that came from that study, stalking and harassing was number one, followed by remote access scams, followed by stealing or sharing content without consent—three very different sorts of cybercrime. But those three cause more harm to the community than any other sort of cybercrime,” he said.

According to the Cybercrime Harm Index (pdf), the impacts of cybercrime extended beyond financial losses. Victims reported difficulties knowing which information to trust online (22 percent), reduced confidence in using the internet for personal affairs (14.5 percent), and the need to change personal, banking or contact details (13.2 percent).

This was followed by negative impacts on victims’ studies (12.8 per cent) and a loss of trust in other people (11.6 per cent).

In addition, 15.9 percent of the respondents reported health-related harms, and 15.3 percent reported financial problems.

With law enforcement already stretched to cope with the prevalence of cybercrime, it is vitally important that people take precautions to protect themselves, Brown advised.

“Our research shows that roughly a third of the population take up the common forms of security measures,” he said. “They check and recheck their security settings and patch their security settings, they change their passwords, [and] they use long passwords.

“But roughly two-thirds of the population don’t even do the basics.”