Exploring cybercrime and traditional crime on Telegram in the Netherlands

This study explores cybercrime and traditional crime on Telegram in 26 Dutch group chats. We leverage a dataset compromising 3.5 million messages posted by more than 37,000 users in a one-year timeframe. These messages were related to various illicit goods and services, including hard drugs and phishing kits. Descriptive analysis revealed that traditional crime markets were larger than cybercrime markets in terms of number of users and number of messages. A small subset of users could be characterised as cafeteria-style offenders, involved both in traditional crime and cybercrime: they act on new criminal opportunities facilitated by the use of Telegram. Other users utilise Telegram only to improve already existing crime scripts and stick to what they know, such as selling drugs. Our findings imply that certain groups on Telegram offer access to the necessary components and people to commit crime.