The Applicable Law on Digital Fraud

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused numerous changes to our daily lives. One of these changes was our increased usage of the internet as a medium to purchase products and services or even manage our finances among others. Such overreliance caused numerous challenges to organisations and individuals alike circling around protection of information shared digitally. This is particularly evident since COVID-19 contributed to the increase in cybercrime. To facilitate their cybercrime, cybercriminals designed numerous cyber-attacks to steal sensitive information from organisations and users for financial gains.

The advent of the pandemic and remote working brought the issue of jurisdiction in relation to cross-border crime to the forefront. With most of the financial sector working from home using online solutions and several employees not working from the country of employment rather from their country of origin or from other countries, the issue of cybersecurity and cybercrime becomes a matter of prime importance. Due to the pandemic, investigations and international collaborations on cross-border crime became more delicate and, by adding the issue of applicable law and jurisdiction, the picture becomes more problematic especially since pursuing criminal activity turned into a difficult task during the pandemic.

With that in mind, the paper probes the issue of cross-border digital crime and the problem of conflict of laws applicable on cybercrime. It scrutinises the exterritoriality of laws through the territoriality principal and probes the role of the principal of jurisdiction over nationals to settle the debate about the governing law over digital financial crimes committed in cyberspace originating in another country. This is done while keeping in mind the need to establish sufficient links between the cybercrime and the applicable law.