Richard McMahon, Ph.D., and Linda Bressler, Ph.D., University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) associate professors in the College of Business, and Martin Bressler, Ph.D., from Southeastern Oklahoma State University, received the Distinguished Research Award from the Academy of Legal, Ethical, and Regulatory Issues for an article they co-authored titled, New Global Cyber-Crimes Call for High-Tech Cyber-Cops.

McMahon and Martin Bressler accepted the award at the Allied Academies International Conference in New Orleans.

"When we started researching this topic, we were astounded by the volume of new fraud activity bombarding businesses every day," said Linda Bressler. "In particular, we were most interested in ransomware attacks. Immediately after we submitted our conference paper, there was much publicity about ransomware and healthcare. This coincidence brought about acceptance of our paper to both the journal and the conference at the same time, which has never happened to us before."

She added, "Dr. McMahon and I are very fortunate that our dean and department chair support our scholarly/creative activities. It made such an honor possible."

According to their research, more than 13 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2015, with an approximate cost of $18 billion. It is estimated that identity theft fraud exceeded $200 billion globally. Linda Bressler and her colleagues identified and described a wide range of computer crimes including identity theft, intellectual property theft, illegal online sales, sextortion, sabotage and computer intrusion.