Defense Nicole van der Meulen, 10 December 2010
Fertile Grounds: the Facilitation of Financial Identity theft in the United States and
The Netherlands
Abstract:
On Friday December 10, 2010 at 14:00 Nicole van der Meulen will defend her PhD dissertation
Fertile Grounds: The Facilitation of Financial Identity Theft in the United States and the
Netherlands. Based on a comparative analysis between the United States and the Netherlands,
Nicole has investigated how different societal actors, including states, financial service providers,
consumers, and others facilitate the occurrence of financial identity theft. Through the
identification of these facilitating factors, Nicole has developed an overarching opportunity
structure to demonstrate how certain societal trends nurture the existence and the potential
proliferation of financial identity theft. Simultaneously, Nicole also examined how, based on a
historical analysis, these facilitating factors came into existence in an effort to provide a broader
social context for the opportunity structure. Through the use of a situational crime prevention
framework, and her main findings, Nicole also reflects on the (potential) effectiveness of
previously introduced countermeasures against financial identity theft. Nicole commenced her
PhD research in 2006 at the International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), after she
completed her Master of Science degree in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit in
Amsterdam. Currently, she works as a consultant at Het Expertise Centrum in the Hague.