The Criminal Ecology of Payment Systems : How ‘Identity Theft’ Evolved from Plastic Counterfeiting to ‘Crime of the Century’

In one of his classical articles, Edwin Sutherland highlighted as early as 1940 the mutual benefits that economists and criminologists could derive from a better integration of their knowledge. Although his interdisciplinary invitation was aimed at white collar crime, other forms of delinquency are particularly well suited to a similar approach, “identity theft” being among them. After having examined in the first section of this article the ambiguities and paradoxes that apply to contemporary analyses of “identity theft”, I offer an alternative analytical framework that relies on the concept of coevolution between “identity theft” as we know it and the development of a new payment system from the late 1950s. By using historical and economics data, I show how this fundamental transformation in consumer habits contributed to the emergence of new criminal opportunities, the development of new security measures and private conflict resolution procedures, as well as the decline of other types of crimes