What is Abductive Reasoning

Socially engineered cyber deception and theft seems to have gained prominence in cybercrime. Given the contextual background of inadequate theoretical explanations of socially engineered cyber deception and theft cybercrime, there is the need for theory to better explain and possibly predict activities involved in socially engineered cyber deception and theft. This chapter proposes a theory of socially engineered cyber deception and theft (SECT), with routine activity theory, crime displacement theory, the space transition theory, and empirical review as its foundation. It iteratively combines deductive and inductive approaches to infer the occurrence of socially engineered cyber deception and theft. While the deductive approach serves the deduction leading to the inference, the inductive approach extracts and suggests empirical evidence for a deterministic prediction of the crime occurrence. It is recommended that the theory is further validated to test its applicability.