Miranda Bruce | Busting the booming business of cybercrime
Cybercrime is big business, and it’s often run like a corporation, in offices with managers, water coolers, and sometimes even HR departments.
Cybercrime is big business. So big, in fact, that scam outfits range from isolated office-towers trapping workers in the desert, to whole cities rising out of the jungle. From a steady pipeline of willing employees to humans trafficked across international borders, what geopolitical conditions enable whole office towers of crime to take place?
In partnership with UNSW and Oxford University, Miranda Bruce and the team at the CRIMGOV project are mapping the geography of cybercrime. The US, UK and Germany make the top 20 most popular countries for cybercriminals to operate whilst Australia comes in at number 34. Understanding the factors that lead to this growth in countries will be key to helping policymakers take the cybercrime industry from boom to bust.
Miranda Bruce
Dr Miranda Bruce was awarded her Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from The Australian National University in 2022. Her PhD explored the Internet of Things (IoT) using post-structuralist French theory to understand technological reality. Her current research focuses on the geography of cybercrime - where offenders are located, and why some countries are more likely to become cybercrime hubs than others. From 2022 to 2025 Dr Bruce was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford University researching the geography of cybercrime under the CRIMGOV project. As part of a collaboration between UNSW and the University of Oxford, she has been part of the team working to capture this offline dimension for the very first time in the World Cybercrime Index.