Criminal Poisoning and Product Tampering: Toward an Operational Definition of Malicious Contamination

“Malicious contamination” encompasses multiple crimes that have received little previous academic attention, including poisoning and product tampering. While these acts may seem easy to distinguish, there are many areas of overlap, and so before these crimes and those who commit them can be understood clear definitions must be introduced. The presence or absence of 14 behavioral variables is proposed as a way of distinguishing product tamperings from poisonings, with the empirical definition then tested on 384 malicious contamination incidents. The operational definition successfully distinguishes 92.7% of the cases and allows for a comparison of the differences between poisoning and tampering.