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Commissioned by the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC), Dialogic, in collaboration with a WODC team, conducted research on the nature and extent of unregistered crime - the infamous 'dark number in crimes'.
Registered crime has been decreasing in the Netherlands for years. The (open) question now is whether there is actually a decrease, or if simply less crime is being registered - in other words, an increase in the 'dark number'. The issue is that this so-called 'dark number' largely takes place outside the view of the judiciary. The aim of this research is therefore to gain a better understanding of the nature and extent of this dark number.
In the research, Dialogic focused primarily on cybercrime, horizontal fraud (bankruptcy fraud, online trading fraud, insurance fraud), and organised crime (cannabis cultivation, human trafficking, criminal networks). The expectation is that these phenomena form a large part of unregistered crime and that these topics are not or hardly covered by conventional alternatives for registrations (such as victim surveys). In the research, we describe, among other things, a number of new alternative methods that we have also concretely applied in several cases.
On 21 December 2018, Minister Grapperhaus informed the Second Chamber about the research.
