Endangered Countries On The Internet

Vande writes "Balkanalysis.com has an article about Macedonia being driven towards internet extinction as a result of some blacklists, which also include Bulgaria and Romania. Namely, this poorly written quote from the 'export bureau' (non-gov org) states the reason for being blacklisted: 'Pay close attention to shipping or contact addresses located in countries with a high reported incidence of online fraud and many e-commerce web sites have found a high incidents of on-line fraud as well, such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc..' They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble. Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users. And I thought all this time I was surfing the 'World Wide' Web :/"

Comments

Foreign ISPs

[drewbradford]

Residents of those contries have the option of using foreign ISPs, or even anonymous proxies, to bypass the blacklists.

neworder.box.sk has some links to good anonymous proxies.

Re:Foreign ISPs

[arivanov]

You are misunderstanding the meaning of the blacklist. It is not a blacklist on access. It is a blacklist on e-commerce. 95% of all web stores and mail order shops in EC and US refuse to ship to these countries.

They do not do it out of malice. They do it because they were at one point refused insurance on their card transactions for purchases from these countries. This was done because these countries at the time did not have a banking clearance system which could be used for VISA transactions. In fact most banks were not even members of SWIFT so clearing money was taking 24+ days to travel through a correspondent bank somewhere else in the world after getting government permission for the transfer. So overall the blacklist was fully justified at the time.

While the some countries now have SWIFT and VISA and are OK to ship (Bulgaria), many web stores are yet to amend their policies. Considering the marginal amount of purchases from the countries in question I would say that it is nothing to shout about. Move along.

This may surprise some people, but...

[jessemckinney]

Africa is not a country. It is a continent.

such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc..

At the risk of being insensitive...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I know that blacklists can be heavy handed, but Macedonia's reputation does preceed it.

US Embasy Brief for Travelers To whit: Macedonia has a cash-based economy. The local currency is the denar. Few establishments accept dollars, credit cards or travelers' checks. Travelers are advised to avoid using credit cards due to numerous instances of credit card fraud.

I realize the State Department may be parroting back the same biases as banks and such.

A quick search for "+macedonia +fraud +crime" and "+macedonia +online +fraud" has it listed on almost every bank, shipping, and e-commerce site as a country to suspect. On most of the lists, it's third after Nigeria and Columbia.

Re:At the risk of being insensitive...

[Ivan Todoroski]

It's my (slashdotted) country, you insensitive clod! :)

Joking aside, you're not being insensitive at all, in fact you're quite right. My country's past reputation in this regard is anything but stellar. These days, however, things are incomparably better (new legislation, police much more alert to these types of crimes, etc.)

I expect that as things get better and retailer's confidence rises, the name Macedonia will slowly disappear from those blacklists.

Many online retailers don't accept credit cards from Macedonia for instance, instead requiring payment by direct wire transfer to a bank account. It's a real pain in the butt, as international wire transfers can add more than 30$ to the price you have to pay, so you have to group many things together in a single order, from a single shop, in order to not pay too much (shipping costs to here are already high enough).

This limits the choice of things you can order online, as you can't just order different items from different places, the combined wire transfer fee for each order would be way too much, you have to make sure everything is in big orders from small number of places.

Other than that, it's no big deal.

Some background on internet fraud in Macedonia

[Ivan Todoroski]

The issue came to the public attention about 6-7 years ago (I think), when a bunch of teenagers "discovered" IRC CC trading channels, and got a hold of some stolen credit cards (and once you have a few, you can trade them with people on those channels to get more). They immediately shared them with their friends and started ordering all kinds of stuff online like CDs, watches, perfumes, eyeglasses, and what not, for them, their girlfriends, relatives, etc.

Well, the customs officials noticed the unusual surge in that kind of merchandise coming from a small number of big online retailers, and stemmed the flow immediately.

They would just keep the stuff at customs terminals, and notify the recipients that they should come pick it up. When a kid showed up, they simply asked for proof of order, and if it was ordered via credit card, they asked to see the actual credit card.

If they failed to produce it, the police was notified (the idiots were ordering stuff to their home addresses), and some of the bigger offenders were brought in for interrogation etc. Nobody really got anything more than a slap on the wrist, as most of them were just kids, but it sure ended the massive ordering.

I even remember even a few scary looking guys in suits with laptops at the university where I was studying then, they were going over the computer terminals and servers to extract logs of suspicious activity as some of the orders were coming from there. I later found out they were from the illegal trade department, which means somebody in the police took this very seriously.

In any case, I was surprised at how quickly this was stopped and the responsible people identified, I didn't think the customs and police had any kind of tech savy people among them. :)

On a related note, at about the same time software piracy was thriving in Macedonia, you could get a truck load of latest expensive software for a couple of dollars per CD.

It was really bad, I even distinctly remember I was playing the final retail version of Quake 2 almost a whole WEEK before it was scheduled to appear in US stores :)

Anyway, after some more incidents and complaints by foreign companies, the government really cracked down on this kind of thing a few years ago, and the legislation was slowly brought up to speed to include laws for online commerce, credit card fraud, etc.

Things are very much under control now, but hey, bad reputation (admittedly well deserved) tends to follow you for a long time...

I think your perspecitve is a little off

[Sycraft-fu]

You might want to learn a bit more about the US system, specifically regarding the Internet. Right now, despite what some of our leaders would like, the government does not run or control the Internet in this country. The Internet is run by a bunch of private corperations, public instutions, and so on. At the top level are big communications companies like AT&T. They sell bandwidth to smaller companies and so on until it reaches the consumer. The government actually buys connections from these providers. They do run their own networks, but for internal communication. When they want on the Internet, they get on it just like private ciizens.

So, any and all blacklisting is done by companies and private citizens. If I run a mail server and determine that X netblock, which might be a whole country, is an endless source of problems, I ban it. The government does not tell me to do this or not to do this, that's not up to them. Same with an ISP. They may decide to ban netblocks/countries. Of course they do this at the risk of pissing off their subscribers. If they ban something they want to get to, that'll create backlash. They way the benefits against the risks.

So please, don't get on the nationalist, anti-US kick. The US, as a nation, has NOTHING to do with this. It is companies and individuals excerising their rights in a free society. I have a right to choose who may and may not access my servers. For some servers, any may do so, for others, none but me.

If you, as a South African ISP, want to blacklist the entire US, that is your right (I understand that you are supposed to be a free country as well). However I won't confuse that with the policy of the Sount African government. Also, don't be supprised if your subscribers leave since, at this point, a majority of the Internet still resided in the US (though that continues to change).

I do get really tired of people from other countries blaming any view or action taken by a US citizen on the United States as a whole. Just because a minority in the KKK declares people of African descent to be inferior does NOT mean that is the official position of the US. It means that we have a right to free speech here, even if that speech is racist, stupid, and wrong.

When the US government mandidates bans on other countries, then you come talk to me about US policy. When it's private individuals, blame them, not the US at large.