Cybercrime More Lucrative Than Drugs 282
prostoalex writes "Yahoo is reporting that global cybercrime overtook global drug trafficking in terms of revenue this past year. In related news, only 4% of Internet users can flag 100% of phishing e-mails as fraudulent, and Americans filed 207,000 reports on cybercrime to FBI."
min wage (Score:5, Informative)
As for the phishing problem, I really don't understand why people fall for those. Your bank, or eBay, or Paypal, will never, ever, ever, ever, ever send you an email asking you to disclose any account information. If those people want to contact you for an important reason, they will either call or send you actual mail. This seems like a simple rule to remember, doesn't it?
4% is bogus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fishing survey is bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
Assuming their message doesn't get caught by my spam filters, it will never get past my own two eyeballs.
If a company that I do business with wants to e-mail me something, they'd better just say "go to our website" because I (and many others) won't ever give it a second look otherwise.
Re:So, when I (Score:5, Informative)
This is my field of study, so I feel obliged to throw in my 2 bits here.
When someone refers to a "drug" in the sense of crime, they mean more accurately a "Schedule I Material" (and rarely, Schedule II or III, but usually just I). What does this nonsense mean? Well, in theory anyway, Schedule I is reserved for materials deemed to have no redeeming medical value, with a high possibility of chemical addiction or overdose. Now, given your statement about cigarettes and booze -- you and I both realize that that isn't entirely the case.
While at the core, the doctors who worked with the FDA and the DEA to create the original controlled substances lists were doing so in good faith to protect the population at large from "Snake Oil" and soft drinks with addictive spikes (Ahem, Coca-Cola); there are unfortunately, larger powers at work than even the medical industry today. "Big Tobacco" has been in power in this country for hundreds of years before this country was even a country. So even though nicotine in all scientific methods would be a Schedule I material -- it isn't. This is also the reason THC is Schedule I despite having qualities that should qualify it for Schedule III (your usual prescription medications). Alcohol, for similar social reasons, is not Schedule I either.
Your usual prescription medications are Schedule III; which roughly defined is materials that have useful medical value and low possibility for addiction, but have other qualities such as allergens or drug interactions that merit having a doctor or two check you out before giving you them.
Hope that I have helped
~Rebecca
Re:dotCrime Bubbles (Score:4, Informative)
Drug dealers are mostly young people a bad neighborhood who have nothing better to do. There was a study (in the book Freakonomics) that said that the average lifespan of a guy who stayed in the business to be around four years. Four years! And considering all that, the money they made in profit, with the jail time, etc., they made minimum wage. Being a drug dealer, the study found, had a significant degree of status and a lottery chance of being a kingpin. And that's about all they get from it.
Cybercriminals are sophisticated folks. Many phishers for online brokerages have graduate degrees in finance. (This week's Business Week.) They have capital to invest in their enterprise, too. Of course they're going to make more money and get away with it as compared to drug dealers, even the "high" level ones.
Anyway, I've been crazily modded down recently in weird ways. Look at my history. What the hell is going on? Someone leave me a message.
The name is Valerie McNevin (Score:4, Informative)
So for all of us who are busy googling for this person, the name is not Valerie McNiven, but Valerie McNevin. She is a lawyer, worked for the state of Colorado in about 2002 and then for the World Bank and is now [yahoo.com] with a private company, Cybrinth, LLC [cybrinth.com] which does consulting on cyber crime. The Reuters correspondent did not bother to reveal this.
The article itself is rather confusing - he is actually claiming that cybercrime is perpetrated by "idle youths looking for quick gain"? In the Third World?? And just for fun, once the Reuters dispatch gets rewritten, she turns into a cybercrime guru [securitypronews.com]...
Now, how she gets the number of more that $100 bn being made by cybercrime, I have no idea. I guess it includes the $40 bn revenue Microsoft makes each year...