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

Before you dis romanians

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that that cold soldering iron "Cold Heat" you see advertised on TV late night was invented by Romanian immigrants.

And yeah i use the product it beats the shit out of older soldering irons.

Re:socialism

[tomstdenis]

Canada has 40% unemployment?

Do a google search you xenophobic fucking idiot.

http://www.statcan.ca/english/Subjects/Labour/LFS/ lfs-en.htm

Wow it's 7% in Canada.

What's it in the USA?

http://www.bls.gov/

It's 5%.

Yeah, we're SOOO WORSE off here in Canada....

Tom

Re:Stereotype

[patio11]

If I hadn't blown my mod points yesterday that would have been +1 funny.

Re:Huh?

[zoney_ie]

Yeah, because commuting to an office 2 hours each way and sitting in a cubicle isn't soul destroying at all.

Capitalism is almost as much a lie as communism. The people at the top completely get to screw over the ordinary worker.

It may not look entirely bad in the US, but have you seen capitalism in action in places where people (including kids) work half the day (12hrs+) in appalling conditions for pittance?

Even in somewhere that's a halfway house like Eastern Europe, people often can't afford to, for example, move out of their parent's house. They're coming to places like the UK and Ireland (full work permitted by new EU members there) where for now they can get better paying jobs, but it's a system in decline. Wages will have to continue to decline in the West too - and wages will only go up slowly and to a lower plateau elsewhere.

Ultimately, capitalism and the Western system will fall too. It is a lie (look at the US deficit - an entire economy running on a gaping overdraft). It will just take longer - and may be propped up for more than a century through the continued exploitation of the rest of the world.