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Visa and MasterCard Take Fight To Scammers
An anonymous reader writes "In his latest story, Brian Krebs reports on a collaboration between brand holders and credit card companies to shut down payment processing for rogue online pharmacies, pirate software sellers and fake anti-virus scams. By conducting test purchases, they map out which banks are being used to accept payments for which scams. Writes Krebs, 'Following the money trail showed that a majority of the purchases were processed by just 12 banks in a handful of countries, including Azerbaijan, China, Georgia, Latvia, and Mauritius.' These results are then fed to Visa and Mastercard who typically shut down the merchant accounts 'within one month after a complaint was lodged.' If you can't accept payments, you can't make money — and without money you can't pay the spammers who advertise your product. This effort is apparently quite effective and has led to much concern by those running such sites."
that we're shutting down scams and such, but it's interesting to think about some of the side effects of all this computing horse power and the general increase in productivity it entails. Basically, these are criminals living on the fringes, and with modern statistical analysis getting so easy (because you can crunch massive amounts of data on the cheap) we're going to start really squeezing those people. There are millions and millions of people in this class. Some are criminals (like these) and some are honest people who used to get by on waste product and over production. If you live in the States and are over 30 you probably remember bags of Halloween candy for 50 cents. You don't find them any more because they've crunched the numbers and figured out exactly how much candy to order so they don't come up short. Best you'll see if 50% off and a weak selection.
It's like that everywhere in society. It's going to be interesting (and scary) to see what happens as we squeeze these people more and more. Most countries are moving towards Austerity and 19th century style 'Invisible Hand' economics so we're not just going to hand them food. Roving bands of bandits, anyone?
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Depends... if they're selling to the US, it could possibly be shut down, as the drugs wouldn't be FDA-tested, and so puchasing/delivering to the US is just as illegal as Cocaine.
If they're only selling to countries where their drugs are legal trade, then there shouldn't be a problem.
So, when will they cut off the IMF, World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and the Federal Reserve, and all the European Banks that robbed their respective countries?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If they are also selling brand name medicine that they purchased from those companies and not distributing generics under brand names. If you RTFA, you'd have learned that is what is getting them shut down: infringing on the brands of pharmaceuticals. Many are switching to just promoting them under the generic name to avoid being shut down. Companies also selling "OEM" copies of software are also getting shut down for selling pirated versions. Its more of a trademark thing than anything else.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There is no way to go after scammers in a way that won't be abused by big pharma to also go after unwanted competition.
Both have the same effect of keeping money out of their pockets and it really doesn't matter to them if our money goes into a scammer's pocket, a competitor's pocket, or stays in our pocket. All they care about is that they're NOT the ones getting it in THEIR pocket.
Much the same reasoning is why child porn shouldn't be outlawed: The resulting censorship hides the abuses in making the awful stuff. This is already superfluous because the pictures are by themselves awful enough that unless you're into that stuff, you don't want to look at it, period. And we do want to stop the abuses. Yet what we do hides them instead. And then opens the door to more censorship, like in the name of terrorism or copyright or what have you. Including political dissent. Oops.
Too busy "thinking of the children" to consider the consequences? Well, there's consequences to this financial thing too.
In banking, this sort of rulery has been creeping in for a while now, to the point that in plenty places you can't open a bank account without leaving a copy of your passport (and often thus also the local equivalent of a SSN). Every transaction leaves a paper trail. Cash is busily being phased out for chip&pin, even outlawed in places. Thus we create an underclass of have-nots without access to banking and eventually without access to basic necessities like food because you need a bank account with your chip&pin to buy such things. And everyone else has no privacy left. Oops.
On that note, one of the worst and most insidious threats to privacy are... tax rules. In particular, those that require, as they do in certain countries, that each transaction be kept on record for N years, where N is 7, or 10, or .... As with the advent of cc and chip&pin and other electronic payment systems, everything you buy now has your name attached, as well as a time and a place. Kept for years.
You know, I think I'll take a world where the scammers can have access to banking over one where random corporations are expected to decide whether you're a scammer or not. On balance.
At the same time I do expect law enforcement to go after scammers swiftly. Both to weed out the false positives right quick, and to limit the damage the real scammers can do.
So I second the parent, though maybe there is merit in trying to explain this non-obvious problem space to lay people, since obvious the highly erudite and impartial slashdot crowd already has trouble figuring it out. Too busy cheering perhaps.
We did it with the Chinese and opium.
In the 19thC, the chinese banned opium, and also banned trade with the west. But there was a black market for opium in china, so the british just shipped it from india as a method to get access to chinese goods.
It never would have happened if but for two things: europeans thought that trade is their *right* (with china or elsewhere), and the chinese believed themselves to be utterly superior in all things to the barbarians, and could therefore ignore and dictate terms.
Chinese now refer to this period as the "century of humiliation", and there was much legitimate humiliation. In the end, the europeans won because they had ironclads and modern armies. Might made right. If the chinese had acknowledged that they had come up against barbarians that they couldn't control, then there would have been no trade embargo, and no century of humiliation. After-all, trade was all the european powers were after fundamentally. (Exception: Russa wanted territory, and got a lot of it.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I watched a doco a while back about some people from doctors without borders and others who were talking about fake medicine, apparently it's quite a problem in Africa, they have fake generics as well as fake brands, and by fake I mean no active ingredient. Even fake saline solution for hospitals is a problem, it had became so troublesome for visiting surgeons on this documentary that they were bringing their own saline with them. As much as I resent a huge bureaucracy around medicine, all the alternatives I've seen are much worse.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.