Advancing the human factor in cybercrime scholarship: challenges and research avenues

Cybercrime is often framed as a technical problem, yet it is also shaped by human choices, social relationships, and institutional responses. The Human Factor in Cybercrime (HFC) scholarship emerges from this recognition, positioning this “human factor” not as a residual to technical analysis but as the central inquiry. This introduction discusses the emergence and maturation of the HFC scholarship and synthesizes key contributions from the eight studies that form this double special issue originating from the 2025 Montreal conference. The articles collectively advance three core HFC themes: understanding offender organization, examining victimization experiences, and evaluating institutional responses. Most importantly, the studies highlight four cross-cutting challenges for future HFC research, that is, the need to 1) theorize the interplay between online and offline contexts, 2) deepen theoretical and interdisciplinary integrations, 3) address persistent blind spots in understanding cybercrime victimization, and 4) re-evaluate the reliability of online interactions as evidence in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Together, these challenges, and many others, shape the future of HFC scholarship, highlighting that the study of cybercrime must remain as adaptive, interdisciplinary, and dynamic as the phenomena it seeks to explain.