What's 'just' about 'just go online'?
Online is now a high crime neighborhood and it's bad for your health. To 'just go online' means exposing oneself to a wide range of crimes, from frauds and scams to stalking, abuse, and harassment.
Just go online is a phrase we hear a lot these days, from government agencies, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and almost every commercial entity with which we interact. Just go online makes it sound like going online is a simple, safe, and perfectly natural thing to do. Just go online to get information, support, customer service. Just go online to use artificial intelligence. Just go online to pay bills, complete forms, answer questions. Just go online to apply for benefits, subsidies, assistance, etc.
But these days, there’s nothing “just” about going online. There is ample evidence that to go online now, whether it’s use email or automate your life with AI, is to expose oneself to a wide range of criminal activity. Having any form of online presence pretty much guarantees you will be targeted by fraudsters scammers, grifters, and thieves. At the same time, the option to stay offline is fast disappearing thanks to governments, utilities, banks, schools, and other institutions. In this article I explain why this situation is not healthy, and why encouraging people to go online is unethical, and potentially unlawful, unless you are completely honest and transparent about what a dangerous and unhealthy place online has become.
Yes, online really is that bad
According to the UK National Crime Agency: “Fraud remains the most common crime type experienced by victims in England and Wales.” According to the House of Lords: “an adult aged 16 or over in England and Wales is more likely to become a victim of fraud than any other individual crime type.”
In America, a large survey of US adults found “Scams — and seemingly constant scam attempts by phone, email and text — have grown so pervasive, two-thirds of Americans say they’re at a crisis level” (AARP). And that was a few years ago. Things have got worse since then.
The surge in losses that people have suffered due to Internet crime since 2020 is reflected in this graph I put together from the annual reports compiled by the FBI’s Internet Crime and Complaint Center:
The data behind these statistics are not perfect, and the reports don’t capture anything like the full extent of Internet crime losses, but in my professional opinion the curve you see correctly reflects the trend in online criminal activity so far this century. (Here is a link to my peer-reviewed work on the problems inherent in measuring cybercrime.)
Pricing harm , and social value
As you can see, in just seven years Internet crime losses rose more than 10X, from $1.5 billion in 2017 to over $16 billion in 2024. However, bad as those numbers are, they only capture one aspect of the harm caused by online crime, the financial loss from victimization. Harms beyond financial loss can exact a toll equal to or even greater than loss of money. This was firmly established by Modal and Anderson in their pioneering 2015 article: It’s All Over but the Crying: The Emotional and Financial Impact of Internet Fraud. As they put it: “Internet fraud’s emotional impact is a major component of victimization and felt as strongly as the financial impacts.”
Thankfully, using social value studies we are learning that the harm to fraud victims is often greater than their financial loss, as much as 4X in one major study (see my talk on this in June, 2023). Furthermore, such studies can put a value on the hit we take from crimes even when we don’t lose any money.
We need more research on social value across all levels of impact from predatory crimes. I find it helpful to think of five impact levels, with level one being the worst, and level five being the least worst, although still not without harm. I’ve described them here, with examples from traditional crimes (meatspace) and digitally-enabled crimes (cyberspace).
Allow me to explain how we can attach a measure of loss to each level, starting with level one, where the fraud victim loses money and doesn’t get it back. In 2021, a company that specializes in social value studies, Simetrica-Jacobs, worked with the UK consumer watchdog Which? to monetize the change in life satisfaction associated with being scammed. They found that “fraud victims would require £2,509 ($3,150) of extra income, on average, to have a level of life satisfaction equivalent to what would be expected had the person not been scammed.” (Simetrica-Jacobs-Which?.)
This study was conducted, “Following best-practice guidance from HM Treasury … and using an unbiased estimate of the impact of income on one’s life satisfaction (Fujiwara & Dass, 2021).” (PDF of full report.)
The average loss for in the national victim database analysed by Simetrica-Jacobs-was about £600, one quarter of the non-financial hit. The study found that this was true of both offline and online fraud, with some indications that the latter may cause even more harm. Overall, the social value impact of even relatively minor fraud was on a par with the impact of being physically threatened” (see Scams and Subjective Wellbeing, 2021).
Health impact of exposure to crime
But what about crimes below level one, criminal encounters and exposure to crime. I think most readers will know—either from direct experiences or those of friends and family—we don’t have to lose money to a criminal to suffer harm. Being targeted by criminals can also take a toll on both our mental and physical health. Simply being exposed to crime has negative health effects. We know this instinctively, it's common sense, but we also know this scientifically because widely the effects of crime adjacency have been studied by criminologists and other social scientists, as well as epidemiologists and environmental health experts.
This is evident when you google the phrase health in high crime neighborhoods. When I did that a few years ago, the first search result was this:
“Studies have indicated neighborhood crime can harm health even among people not directly impacted by the violence. Potential long-lasting effects include increases in blood pressure and obesity, both risk factors for cardiovascular disease.”
That’s a quote from: “The Ripple Effect of Neighborhood Crime: When Crime Decreases, So Do Cardiovascular and Coronary Artery Disease Mortality Rates.” The article was written by Lauren Eberly, MD, MPH, and Sameed Khatana, MD, MPH, of the University of Pennsylvania. The same authors, plus seven more, wrote “Association Between Community Level Violent Crime and Cardiovascular Mortality in Chicago: A Longitudinal Analysis,” published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in July of 2022.
When it comes to the mental health of being exposed to crime, here’s a snippet from “The impact of neighbourhood crime on mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” by Gergő Baranyi et al.:
“living in a high crime area exposes residents to increased social stress linked to mental health through biological mechanisms by disrupting the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis regulating the stress response (Do et al., 2011), or by causing systematic inflammation in the body (Nazmi et al., 2010).”
Let’s face it, there is a ton of evidence that spending time in a high crime environment is demonstrably bad for both our mental and physical health; and there’s a chunk of solid, peer-reviewed science to back that up. (I have listed two dozen papers at the bottom of this article.) And there is no doubt in my mind that anyone who has an online presence is, in a very real sense, living in a high crime neighborhood. Our bodies my not feel threatened as we go out and about, but our brains are dealing with criminal targeting wherever we go.
Enter the exposome
One reason I believe that “just going online” is bad for human health comes from the epidemiological concept of the exposome, a term meaning “to describe environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health.” (Wikipedia). The following is a useful introduction to the exposome from a 2017 journal article, The exposome and the future of epidemiology: a vision and prospect:
“It is widely accepted that a relatively small proportion of chronic disease can be explained by genetic factors alone. Although information about environmental exposure is important to comprehensively evaluate chronic diseases, this information is not sufficiently or accurately assessed by comparison with genomic factors. To emphasize the importance of more complete evaluation of environmental exposure, the concept of the exposome, which indicates the entirety of environmental exposure from conception onwards, was introduced in 2005.” (Environmental Analysis, Health and Toxicology, Kyoung-Nam Kim and Yun-Chul Hong, 2017.)
The diagram below, by Martine Vrijheid, Research Professor and Head of the Environment and Health over the Lifecourse Programme at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, may help you visualize the exposome. You can see that it encompasses exposures in both our internal and external environment, with the latter consisting of general and specific environments (see The exposome: a new paradigm to study the impact of environment on health, 2014.)
The online exposome
A key role of the exposome is to help us acknowledge and account for everything to which we are exposed in our daily lives that may affect our health. The article quoted earlier by Kim and Hong puts it like this: “The exposome encompasses not only environmental chemicals and pollutants but also lifestyle, socioeconomic status, social capital and the social environment, and even biological responses.”
For me, it’s clear that everything to which we are exposed by “being online” is part of the exposome. I’ve taken the liberty of expanding Prof. Vrijheid’s illustration to help visualize this. My crudely drawn icons on the left represent smartphones, tablets, VR headsets, laptops and desktop computers, devices on which many people spend many hours every day in a range of activities that expose them to crime.
When I first read about the exposome, I thought the term “digital exposome” would be a good way to refer to the digital environment we inhabit when we “go online.” Not surprisingly, I was not the first person to think of this term. For example, it appears in a 2017 article from Studies in Health Technology and Informatics: “In an increasingly digitised world more attention should be paid to the digital component of the exposome derived from the interactions of individuals with the digital world. We define this “Digital Exposome” as the whole set of tools and platforms that an individual uses and the activities and processes that an individual engages with as part of his/her digital life.” (G. Lopez-Campos et al., 2017)
While I strongly agree with the gist of that article, I have also found digital exposome used in other ways, for example, to describe the use of digital tools to record pollution exposure in the general and specific external environment (think personal air quality monitoring devices and so on).
Thus, I propose online exposome as a more appropriate term for “the set of tools and platforms that an individual uses and the activities and processes that an individual engages with as part of his/her digital life.” The online exposome includes using a smartphone or other Internet-connected device, having an email address and one or more online accounts, and engaging digitally with individuals or organizations.
The online exposome as high crime neighbourhood
I am confident in asserting that the online exposome is, in some significant ways, similar to a high crime physical environment. However, there are some serious and frankly worrying differences between living in a high crime physical neighbourhood and going online. For a start, it can be harder—in some ways—to get out of being online than it is to move out of a high crime neighbourhood (and I say this fully mindful of how socio-economic factors can trap people in disadvantaged locations).
Consider what it takes to get to a point where online crime is no longer a concern. People use terms like “going offline” or “disconnecting” when they forsake their screens for the weekend, or leave phones and computers at home when they go on vacation. But our online presence persists even when we’re not logged on, and unless we excel at compartmentalizing, so does the stress of knowing that our digital identity can be stolen and abused while we’re offline (it can even be hacked and hijacked after we’re dead). To go offline completely means closing accounts, erasing profiles, deleting cloud storage and all the data entities have stored about you as a result of your online interactions.
To be clear, I’m not advocating that we should all go offline. There are many genuine benefits to being online. But I would argue that it’s now impossible to enjoy those benefits without being exposed to the harmful effects of criminal activity. At the same time, many of the entities that benefit from us going online are failing to do all they can to make it a safe and healthy place to be.
It should also be noted that some “benefits” of going online feel so good they are addicting, further complicating efforts to manage exposure to the online exposome. Intentional fostering of online addiction for profit is now at the center of some big lawsuits and I am hopeful these cases will lead to positive changes. However, I also think serious regulation of online technologies is needed at the national and international level.
Duty of care when saying “go online”
Both professionally and personally, I see the online exposome as highly criminogenic, that is: “causing or likely to cause criminal behaviour.” Indeed, for decades many countries devote an entire month each year to raise everyone’s awareness of all the things one needs to do, or not do, in order to avoid becoming a victim of online crime (I mean Cybersecurity Awareness Month).
We are now at a point when warnings that cyber-criminals are out to get us, to take our money and data, to access our accounts and devices, are everywhere, all the time. All of which raises the following question: If an entity requires a person to go online, do they have a duty of care to that person when they do go online? I think the answer is YES!
Entities that require a person to go online have a responsibility, a duty of care, to protect that person from the harms they may suffer from being online.
I also think that the current levels of digitally-enabled crime mean that many institutions are in breach of this duty of care. As I see it, there is an urgent need for all countries to address the detrimental effects of their citizens going online.
A few years ago, the average number of hours per day that working age users spent online was somewhere between six and seven hours (DataReportal). I’m pretty sure it is even higher now that we have chatbots and AI to tempt/urge/force us). It is clear that by going online, even for short periods of time, we add another dimension to our total environmental exposure, one that contains considerable potential for harmful effects on our health.
Imagine you are on a crowded train, an example of the general external exposome. You are exposed to bacteria, viral diseases, and air pollution. You are also exposed to pickpockets and stalkers. It’s not exactly a healthy environment, but in most countries a train in not considered a high crime environment. There are measures in place to protect your physical security. But when you use your smartphone you are exposed to criminal activity on top of all the other potentially harmful exposures (as I attempted to illustrate earlier in this article).
Clearly, there are many reasons why governments need to do more to reduce cybercrime; but, as far as I can tell, protecting the health of the country’s population has not yet been accepted as one of those reasons. That needs to change, starting now. The welfare of our society is being drastically undermined by rampant online crime, as are the benefits of current and future online technology.
Summary
Hopefully, some legal experts out there will read this article and be inspired to pursue litigation based on the information that I have laid out. For example, they could develop cases that confirm a duty of care arising from online imperatives, achieving settlements that push governments and companies to either drop “go online” requirements or do more to make going online less harmful. At the same time, legislation is needed to acknowledge the full range of harms suffered by victims of cybercrime, including those aided and abetted and enabled by AI, along with adequate funding of victim support to minimize the short- and long-term impact of those harms on individuals, families, and society at large.
In closing, if you think this article makes a good case for the following four assertions, please share it with others:
Going online exposes us to a lot of crime. We experience criminal activity due to having online accounts, exposing us to crime through emails, texts, social media posts, malicious advertising, poisoned search results, and so on.
High crime environments are unhealthy. We know multiple studies show exposure to crime, online as well as offline, has harmful impacts on mental and physical health, individually and across society.
Governments and companies that make us go online may be breaching their duty of care. We see people going online because some entities force them to do so, even though those entities know that going online exposes people to harms and victimization against which there is currently inadequate protection.
More must be done to reduce cybercrime and support cybercrime victims: We see the current situation causing multiple preventable harms and seriously undermining the benefits of current and future technologies.
Updates:
October, 2025: The article was re-formatted and updated for Substack.
October, 2024: I gave a talk about the impact of cybercrime on human health at an excellent cybersecurity conference in Denmark (Cyberhagen 2024). The conference organizers have kindly shared their recording of the talk and it is now live on my YouTube channel. If you find the talk helpful, please Like and Subscribe and tell others about it. (Pro YouTube tip: skip to 8 minutes and 39 seconds if you are already familiar with me and my background.) Here is a link to more of my work on health and cybercrime.
Notes:
A. This article is based on a talk I was going to give at a conference in Barcelona in November, 2023. Unfortunately, my partner’s health made attending that event impractical. If I am invited to give the talk at some point, I will add a section addressing the inequity factor at the nexus of online access imperatives and cybercrime harms. (There are multiple socio-economic barriers to “just going online,” often summed up as the digital divide. This exists in every country; for example, 20% of UK adults lack basic digital skills, a situation vigorously addressed by this UK charity.)
B. I am grateful to Foy Shriver and Peter Cassidy of APWG and Ford Merrill, and the folks at Cyberhagen, for encouraging my research in this space. I love the title that Peter proposed for my talk at APWG EU 2023 Tech Summit and Researchers Sync-Up: Are Online Access Imperatives Going to Make Us Sick? I particularly liked, and have adopted, the very apt phrase: “Online Access Imperatives.”
C. In my opinion, lawyers in America should explore and/or sponsor the research I have referenced on the non-financial harms caused by online crime; then they should mount fresh challenges to the inhuman and illogical US court rulings that insist—in the face of common sense and lived experience—that having one’s data privacy breached by criminals causes no serious harms aside from material losses for which victims have receipts.
E. Here’s a link to Google Search results around the health effects of exposure to crime.
F. Below is a list of twodozen articles from my somewhat informal review of the literature (apologies for lack of links but they should all show up in Google Scholar). Even a quick scan of these titles gives you a good idea of how much work has been done on the health effects of living in a high crime neighborhood.
High Crime Neighborhoods as a Driver for Toxic Stress Leading to Asthma, Paracha, Alizay; Hendrix, Amy; Hemming, Eden; Munoz, Ric; Couch, Taylor; Gent, Carmen; Homco, Juell; Schaefer, Shawn; Merrill, April; 2020
Residence in high-crime neighborhoods moderates the association between interleukin 6 and social and nonsocial reward brain responses, Chat, Iris Ka-Yi; Gepty, Andrew A; Kautz, Marin; Mac Giollabhui, Naoise; Adogli, Zoe V; Coe, Christopher L; Abramson, Lyn Y; Olino, Thomas M; Alloy, Lauren B; Biological psychiatry global open science, 2022, Elsevier
Crime, neighborhood deprivation, and asthma: a GIS approach to define and assess neighborhoods: Crime, neighborhood deprivation, and asthma: a GIS approach to define and assess neighborhoods, Gale, Sara L; Magzamen, Sheryl L; Radke, John D; Tager, Ira B; Spatial and spatio-temporal epidemiology, 2011, Elsevier
Neighborhood violent crime and perceived stress in pregnancy, Kneeshaw-Price, Stephanie H; Saelens, Brian E; Sallis, James F; Frank, Lawrence D; Grembowski, David E; Hannon, Peggy A; Smith, Nicholas L; Chan, KC Gary; Journal of Urban Health, 2015, Springer
Neighborhood crime and depressive symptoms among African American women: Genetic moderation and epigenetic mediation of effects, Lei, Man-Kit; Beach, Steven RH; Simons, Ronald L; Philibert, Robert A; Social science & medicine, 2015, Elsevier
Pathways to depression: The impact of neighborhood violent crime on inner-city residents in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Curry, Aaron; Latkin, Carl; Davey-Rothwell, Melissa; Social science & medicine, 2008, Elsevier
Association of Neighborhood Crime with AML [acute myeloid leukemia] Molecular Subtypes and Survival, Nwachukwu, M., Rauscher, G., Abraham, I., Quigley, J.G., Sayad, J., Dave, A., Wilmington, A., Zhang, C., Patel, A.A., Palmer, A. and Shah, S.; Blood, 2024
Neighborhood crime-related safety and its relation to children’s physical activity, Kneeshaw-Price, Stephanie H; Saelens, Brian E; Sallis, James F; Frank, Lawrence D; Grembowski, David E; Hannon, Peggy A; Smith, Nicholas L; Chan, KC Gary; Journal of Urban Health, 2015, Springer
Social connection to neighbors, multiple victimization, and current health among women residing in high crime neighborhoods, Linares, L Oriana; Journal of Family Violence, 2004, Springer
Neighborhood stressors and cardiovascular health: Crime and C-reactive protein in Dallas, USA, Browning, Christopher R; Cagney, Kathleen A; Iveniuk, James; Social science & medicine, 2012, Elsevier
Differences by race in the associations between neighborhood crime and violence and glycemic control among adults with type 2 diabetes, Akinboboye, Olaitan; Williams, Joni S; Olukotun, Oluwatoyin; Egede, Leonard E; PLoS one, 2022, Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA USA
High-crime neighborhoods as a war zone: comparing trauma as a result of war and neighborhood violence, Paivanas, Tessa; 2017 University of Pittsburgh
The association between experiences of being defrauded and depressive symptoms of middle-aged and elderly people: a cross-sectional study in China, Wang, X; Ma, J; Liang, Y; Ma, L; Liu, P; Public Health, 2023, Elsevier
Impact of self-reported bank fraud on self-rated health, comorbidity and pain, Sanz-Barbero, Belén; Rico Gomez, Ana; Ayala, Alba; Recio, Patricia; Sarriá, Encarnación; Díaz-Olalla, Manuel; Zunzunegui, María Victoria; International journal of public health, 2020, Springer
Not a victimless crime: The impact of fraud on individual victims and their families, Button, Mark; Lewis, Chris; Tapley, Jacki; Security Journal, 2014, Springer
Increasing cybercrime since the pandemic: Concerns for psychiatry, Monteith, Scott; Bauer, Michael; Alda, Martin; Geddes, John; Whybrow, Peter C; Glenn, Tasha; Current psychiatry reports, 2021, Springer
Corruption, fraud and cybercrime as dehumanizing phenomena, Dion, Michel; International Journal of Social Economics, 2011, Emerald Group Publishing
E-fraud: Exploring its prevalence and victim impact, Van Dijk, JJM; Kunst, MJJ; Journal International de Victimologie| International Journal of Victimology, 2010
Exploring how, why and in what contexts older adults are at risk of financial cybercrime victimisation: A realist review, Cross, Cassandra; Lee, Murray; Victims & Offenders, 2022, Taylor & Francis
Smartphone addiction and cybercrime victimization in the context of lifestyles routine activities and self-control theories: The user’s dual vulnerability model of cybercrime victimization, Herrero, Juan; Torres, Andrea; Vivas, Pep; Hidalgo, Antonio; Rodríguez, Francisco J; Urueña, Alberto; International journal of environmental research and public health, 2021, MDPI
The “Right to Control” Theory of Fraud: When Deception without Harm Becomes a Crime, Park, Tai H; Cardozo L. Rev., 2021, HeinOnline
Denying victim status to online fraud victims: the challenges of being a ‘non-ideal victim’, Cross, Cassandra; Revisiting the ‘Ideal Victim’, 2018, Policy Press
The reporting experiences and support needs of victims of online fraud, Cross, Cassandra; Richards, Kelly; Smith, Russell G; Trends and issues in crime and criminal justice, 2016, Australian Institute of Criminology Woden, ACT
Perception of neighborhood crime and drugs increases cardiometabolic risk in Chilean adolescents, Martinez, S.M., Blanco, E., Delva, J., Burrows, R., Reyes, M., Lozoff, B. and Gahagan, S., 2014, Journal of Adolescent Health
Hot spots of crime are not just hot spots of crime: Examining health outcomes at street segments, Weisburd, D. and White, C., Journal of contemporary criminal justice, 2019
Neighborhood Safety and Hypertension Risk: A Systematic Review, Kim, Y., Jang, S., Ullahansari, S., Vo, J., Hyun, K. and Fadel, P.J., Journal of the American Heart Association, 2025