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I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI

Posted by Zonk on from the well-not-me-the-guy-who-wrote-the-article dept.

Hoi Polloi writes "Wired News has a series starting on internet crime. The first piece they have up covers the story of a cybercrook who specialized in credit card fraud. Caught in a sting operation in November of 2002, the man who identified himself as 'El Mariachi' on message boards would lead a double life for the next two years working for the FBI. As he reported on credit card scammers, dodged his former associates, and stopped criminals from defrauding the 2004 presidential campaign, he also tried to keep his life together. A fascinating tale that looks at the face of modern crime, and crime-stopping techniques."

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. I was a lying media whore by spun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTFA Footnotes "The logs appear to be legitimate but Wired News was unable to verify that they were recorded on behalf of the FBI or that they were unaltered by Thomas."

    Translation: this guy made it all up and sold his story to Wired, the Weekly World News for techies.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  2. The long tail of cybercrime by necro81 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    FTFA:

    He told Secret Service agent Michael Levin what he'd done for the Russians, but Levin wasn't impressed. According to Thomas, the agent replied that he had multi-million-dollar cases on his desk and wasn't going to waste time on a lousy $50,000 internet scam.
    Unfortunately, this is true of all crime: the scarce resources of law enforcement are generally allocated to the relatively small number of big crimes, while the much larger number of petty crimes are often left untouched. I'd guess that this is particularly true of cybercrime, where the law enforcement resources are more scarce, the big crimes are bigger, and the little crimes like "petty" identity theft are a drop in the bucket. Identity theft is hardly petty to the victim, however, it can ruin their finances and credit for years, and takes tremendous amounts of work to clear up, even when you are lucky enough to not get stuck with the bill.