eBay vs. Romania's Online Scammers

spinctrl links to an interesting story in the L.A. Times about the cloak-and-daggerism of fighting online scams in Romania, summing it up like this: "The country is the top source of auction site scams. One company is trying to do something about it, with increasing collaboration from local law enforcement over recent years. Ebay has sent over equipment and a team to help the authorities combat this form of cyber crime, which is run with all the organization of an industrial-scale business."

Comments

Effort

[Archangel Michael]

It always amazes me the effort criminals use to commit crimes. However, I finally realized what the issue is and it comes right back down to supply and demand.

The demand for legal use of the skills required to pull this off, is already saturated with the supply of legal workforce, so the criminal moves to a more lucrative marketplace, the black market. When applying the same skill level and effort of his legal counterparts, the criminal maximizes his/her profit potential by moving to a marketplace that has much lower supplies.

The only thing that can counter act this phenomenon is making getting caught extremely expensive, thus driving up the "cost" of the black marketplace. I suggest to you, that financial or incarceration penalties are not nearly enough to drive the markets to unprofitability, that it requires something more costly and more effective ....

I'll leave the particulars up everyone else to ponder.