Slashdot Mirror
The World's Top Cybercriminals
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek profiles four individuals identified by law enforcement as the world's foremost online criminals. They're accused of crimes ranging from re-shipping rings to credit card theft and email fraud -- '...all are Russian. Strong technical universities, comparatively low incomes, and an unstable legal system make the former Soviet Union an ideal breeding ground for cyberscams. Also, tense political relations sometimes complicate efforts to obtain cooperation with local law enforcement.'"
If you're caught doing something illegal, it's almost guaranteed there is some price you can pay the police to be let go.
In my opinion, this hurts local small businesses immensely. I believe that it makes them more difficult to succeed and lays the groundwork for an instable/weak capitalistic system. There's even a problem with local law enforcement and bribes in many other countries. Honestly, if there was one thing I think that would help countries get back on track, it would be better law enforcement especially on the local level. How can people be expected to work and thrive in a system when the letter of the law is uncertain? How can you expect them to run a business and distribute goods/services if a thief can pay off police when he burglarizes the store?
My work here is dung.
By definition, the world's top cybercriminals will never be identified.
For those who (like me) had no idea why "re-shipping" would break the law (except possibly as some cheesy customs violation), particularly to the extent that someone would count as a member of the top-four international cybercriminals...
The actual crime lies somewhere between (inclusive) credit card fraud and identity theft. The "shipping" part of that just helps launder the profits.
Just an FYI.
we're never going to convince Putin that what he really wants to do is crack down on people who are bringing a lot of money into the economy and who pose no threat at all to him. Trying to fight this through any kind of court just won't work for this reason. The only way we can really hope to stop this kind of thing is to do more lessons in schools about how pretty much every e-mail which isn't from someone you know is a scam. I don't really know what your education was like in IT in American schools but I know that for the first 3 years of secondary school (UK) I had a teacher who couldn't adequately use windows explorer to find files - we always got told to open the "package" (sic) and then go file -> open... not once did they even mention security. In my last 2 years it changed round a bit and there was some information (although a frighteningly inadequate amount) about security best practices and what have you.
If we want to keep people from getting spam scammed then education is the best way
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
It's Ukraine.Well, the second worst spammer (BadCow is third) is Michael Lindsay, of iMedia Networks, California.
Its not surprising that they're Russian (and Ukrainian) if you choose to ignore the Americans.
I wonder what would happen if I posted a link to www.theftservices.com on Slashdot. I mean, what happens to links like www.theftservices.com when they get posted to Slashdot? What effect would it have on www.theftservices.com?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Yeah, that is just what the world needs, a digital version of the military-industrial complex. How depressing.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
So, umm.... in Soviet Russia, you spy on NSA?
Economic sanctions (and cutting off Internet traffic is definitely an economic sanction) tend to entrench bad governments, not overthrow them. In this way, they tend to have the opposite effect of that which is intended. Rather than inciting the populace to rise up against the government, both the populace and the government begin to blame the sanctions for everything wrong with the country. See: Cuba.
Russia has a lot of big problems, a lot of which can be traced back to its being basically an impoverished totalitarian nation for virtually all of its history, followed by a sudden transition into a new form of government (and economy) that they were not prepared for and had no history with. As a result, they are having issues basically with capitalism run amok without the benefit of effective controls.
The solution to this problem is more education among consumers here in the US (people who know how these scams work are less likely to fall for them) coupled with reforms in Russia that will make police less susceptible to bribery (higher wages and more training), and make criminals more likely to be caught and punished (technical training for police and harsh penalties for lawbreakers).
You, sir, should be running the State Department. You're a freakin' genius. Or a shill for the bomb shelter industry.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Evidence, evidence, evidence. Organized crime is brilliant at insulating those at the top from the orders they give those at the bottom. Even in countries where what they're doing is illegal (often not the case with spammers) you still need to tie that person to something through evidence.
RICO is nice in that you can nab higher-ups if you can get two predicate acts on an underling, but a) they tend to shelve said underling after he's busted, because they have lawyers too, and b) most of these acts are against people they've intimidated, cowed, blackmailed, or are criminals themselves, which means we get a missing person and not a murder rap.
You're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to get these guys, essentially you run detectives around looking into what they did, looking for the small screwup that lets them open an investigation and start searching places. It's long and it's tough. Like I said before, "everyone knows he's doing it" isn't evidence.
This is an example of what economists refer to as the "broken window fallacy."
The fallacy goes something like this: "On the whole, it's a good thing for people to go around randomly breaking windows. It creates jobs for the window installers and people who work in glass factories, and even helps to create new markets for shatter-proof windows!"
Although at first glance this appears to help the economy, it's an illusion; all the money that goes toward replacing the broken window is wasted money that could have been spent on actually improving economic infrastructure, rather than simply maintaining it. Perhaps new and improved shatter-resistant windows will be developed, but if there was enough demand to justify their development then it would have happened anyway.
Similarly, every dollar that people have to spend on things like antivirus software is a dollar that they weren't able to spend on improving their products, or hiring more employees of their own, or offering people cheaper prices. All this only benefits you if you are carefully placed within the market to take advantage of it. So yes, computer crime is good for you if you happen to work for a security company, but on the whole it's bad for society and the economy.