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Phishing Is a Minimum-Wage Job
rohitm918 writes "A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): '...low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.' They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. 'Even though it harvests "free money," phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.'"
I mean for one thing, a lot of crime really doesn't pay well. Sometimes even less than a minimum wage job. I remember a few years ago there was a problem of newspaper machines getting broken in to and the change stolen. They finally caught the guy and estimated he'd been making well less than minimum wage. It wasn't a trivial job to get in them and it isn't as though a ton of papers are sold from those. While there certainly are criminals who make bank (like drug lords) often you'll find that really criminals would do just as well to get honest work.
Another thing is that you are talking about something where your success rate is very low, and even when you do have a success in terms of getting info, you don't necessarily get anything with it. Just because you steal someone's account and try to use it, doesn't mean it works. For example I had my credit card stolen. Wasn't a phishing scam, just someone that had got a hold of the number, but either way they had it. As soon as they tried to order something, I noticed. I had the card disabled, the merchant stopped shipment on the goods, and so on. The thief didn't get squat. So even though they were successful in getting my card, they weren't successful in getting anything with it.
So all in all ti doesn't surprise me that phishing is a low paying job. You aren't going to get many bites, some of the ones you DO get will be fake (I love filling out phishing forms with fake data), and even when you do get legit info, you might not get to use it.
Actually, A friend of mine was a marketing intern and turned to "slangin" as he called it. He made quite a bit of cash off the "nickle and dimers" by doing a little market analysis and identifying the non-public congregation points thereby raising his return on time and lowering his risk of being caught since most everyone there knew and could vouch for everyone else, then selling to them exclusively. He became known for delivering the desired goods in a far more timely fashion than could be acquired elsewhere and made those congregation points far more popular in the process. It was interesting to watch this occur. I observed for more than a year and rather enjoyed the constant female attention his customers lavished, you can probably see how that would work, the more you hang out with the supplier, the more deals you get.... In real life, he made a little over minimum wage, and oddly was my boss, then my employee.
Sigh, college life, how we miss you...
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Stripping as a career is not economically rational.
As a person with several strippers for friends, let me enlighten you on market forces in this industry.
Stripper income can be strongly affected by people's perception of the health of the local economy. This effect has a negative correlation with population, meaning that clubs in small towns are even more sensitive to economic change. Belt-tightening can happen in strip clubs the same as anywhere else.
Last but not least, strippers age. As they get older, the physical requirements of the job become too difficult, particularly pole/cage dancing. As you age, you become less desirable and working in premier clubs becomes impossible. The end result for many strippers is they move from seedy to seedier clubs, turn to hooking or simply get a day job. The years spent stripping doesn't help them get a good job either, since the ability to spin around a pole at 1 RPM doesn't help them operate a computer or balance a register.
Working as a stripper for a long term career is a fiscally irrational decision, given that the income is neither stable nor will last for the duration of the time you need money. However, stripping your way through college is a rational decision and I support college-going women's decision to be strippers.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.