Uncovering Cybercrime Displacement Decision-Making: A Computational Analysis of Telegram Scam Posts

This study introduces and tests a cybercrime displacement decision-making framework via the context of cyber fraud. Drawing on rational choice perspective and choice-structuring properties, the study conceptualizes criminal opportunities and motivations as structural moderators that condition the relationship between perceived policing intensity and displacement inclination. Using computational discourse analysis, the study analyzes 192,627 cleaned posts collected from 21 Chinese-speaking Telegram scam communities, temporally spanning September 2023 to February 2026. Time-series lagged correlation and lagged moderation analyses suggest that scammers’ perceived policing intensity is positively associated with their displacement inclination. Importantly, criminal opportunity attenuates, while criminal motivation amplifies, this relationship. The current findings challenge the conventional understanding of location-based policing scholarship, which often finds that “diffusion of benefits” outweighs crime displacement. The study not only advances theoretical understanding of cybercrime displacement but also offers evidence-based implications for addressing opportunity-motivation structure in cybercrime governance.