How the Phishing Biz Works

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Christopher Abad has spent much of the past six months 'stalking the phisher underground,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. 'The typical phisher, he discovered, isn't a movie-style villain but a Romanian teenager, albeit one who belongs to a social and economic infrastructure that is both remarkably sophisticated and utterly ragtag. If, in the early days, phishing scams were one-person operations, they have since become so complicated that, just as with medicine or law, the labor has become specialized.' For instance, a phisher in Romania who successfully scores account information for someone in the U.S. may go on IRC to seek out a 'casher' to withdraw money from the target's account, and send a cut back to the phisher."

Comments

IRC Cashiers Karma

[mfh]

I think the whole thing smacks of a kind of strange Soviet irony that is somehow like Mother Russia's revenge on America. We destroyed their way of life and now they are stealing from our grandparents.

Karma has a strange way of working itself out. Phishing still needs to be stopped and I think the best way to try and stop it is to start building systems that don't add links to emails. Use copy/paste form validation instead. Designing smart systems sometimes means taking the convenience out of it, but no matter what you do, there will always be dumb people who are fooled.

Re:IRC Cashiers Karma

[Strolls]

I'll jump on the bandwagon in replying to this...

We destroyed their way of life and now they are stealing from our grandparents.

They never had a "way of life" - Eastern European people were generally poor under the Tsars [1], poor under communism, and are now poor under their current wild-west, developing democracy.

It's probably more true to say that in many ways the way of life of Eastern European people has been largely unchanged over centuries - I dare say that under communism there were occasional sunny days, that people went to the beach, raised families and were sometimes happy, sometimes sad & stuff. What "democracy" has given Eastern Europe is the influence of the west and of companies who want to sell more mobile phones into emerging markets. Globalisation may be to the advantage of countries where labour is currently cheap & skills undervalued.

As far as "stealing from our grandparents" is concerned, this is simply a matter of the internet empowering petty criminals to operate internationally, same as it has empowered everyone else to operate internationally. That's what the article is about! The matter of Eastern European criminals preying on Western folks is simply explained by the fact that poorer Easter European criminals have more to gain and, because of the difficulties of international enforcement, less to lose than Western criminals.

Tell me: when a member of the Native American community steals your car, do you remark on the irony of that? Is that somehow like Black Elk's revenge?

[1] and under other feudal systems regionally

Re:socialism

[linzeal]

It is 40% as all Americans presume that other countries must use their children and slave labor to make ever more exorbitant products to consume. If you are not forcing people to stand for 8 hours with our a bathroom break you can't be our top trade partners.