Thirty-three states have enacted statutes that encompass in some way what is referred to in this paper as “computer crime”. In some states, computer crime laws are referred to as such only because of the inclusion of the word computer in some general provision. In others, complex and specific statutes exist.

Each of the computer crime state statutes presently in effect has its own peculiar combination of a variety of possible offenses. The bulk of the statutes proscribe as computer crime a core set of activities such as accessing, altering, damaging or destroying a computer with the intent to devise or execute any scheme or artifice to defraud or deceive. This “computer crime”, and a few others to be outlined later, are found in a majority of the state statutes with some individual variations. This paper presents a list of computer crimes common to many of the statutes, describes variations in those crimes and examines in more detail the unusual crimes.