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."

Good..

[blinx_]

I'm all for something being done about the scammers, eBay sometimes looks like all it cares about is getting their own share of the auction price. However what I don't understand is that people still fall for these scams, even the tiniest amount of logic applied before sending money to the scammers would eliminate >90% of the cases. Havn't everyone by now heard about, "If it's too good to be true, it proberly is"?

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.

Re:It's easy to avoid

[Archangel Michael]

First mistake is assuming you can educate enough of the people to make it not profitable. Second mistake is assuming education itself can cure self serving nature. The whole point of these types of crime is that it feeds upon peoples desire to maximize profit / savings.

Do people really think that they can buy Photoshop for $99 when it is sold everywhere else for $299? or Vista Super Delux for $49.95 when there is no such product? Most people know when they're about to be had, but they have this override switch in their brain that tells them that this is the "exception".

I'm sorry, but I have little sympathy for people being had by Nigerian, Online Pharmaceutical, Sexy Girl, Cheap Software scams.

Ebay has always scared me a bit, because you just don't know who you're dealing with. However your suggestions are certainly a good place to start. It will not ever solve the problem because the problem is human nature.

While we're at it...

[wattrlz]

Let's teach people about tech so they don't ask irritating questions and make the same mistakes.

Why stop there, though? Let's teach people about economics so there are no more money problems. Then we should teach them how to drive so they don't have auto accidents. Perhaps we could teach them about copyright law so there is no more maf-IAA... etc. Point being that educating the general populace and getting them to act on their newfound knowledge is usually easier said than done.

They gave the equipment to WHO?

[russotto]

Why do I suspect that much of this donated equipment has gone straight to the scammers. An operation as big as they say pretty much has to involve the "authorities".

Re:Nigeria?

[Giovanni666]

I agree. Are they then going to China to stop counterfeits of all types? What about all the scammers in the USA? If ebay was serious, they would require proper registration at the gate. They would disallow user generated content which contain active scripting formats, and they would completely do away with html based emails which contain links, and 'second chance offers'. They would quit depending solely on the 'community' to police the site (READ: FREELOADING). This is nothing but feeble PR spin, which borders on racism. Simple as that, & they know it. ebay is fraught with troubles of all sorts, & trying desperately to help their sagging image. The fact is, they try a lot harder to conceal the fraud rather than fix the real problems. They have been caught covering up & spewing falsehoods over this entire hacking & Vladuz situation over & again. Back in the summer of '07, around late June-early July they had a similar PR stunt. "eBay cracks down on Romanian fraudsters" http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39287770,00.htm [zdnet.co.uk] After that, the hackers UNLOADED on ebay bigtime! We started to see 10s of thousands of fake listings on hijacked accounts rather than just dozens or hundreds. Anyone ever heard of jimmy.cry?

Re:I can't agree with you

[MythMoth]

What the hell will I do? Stick my hand into "teh tubes", grab their necks and then suck them into the abyss?

In other words, item#1 in your list should be removed, imho.

Sorry, but until your country is statistically a good bet the fact that you personally are an honourable upstanding individual is completely irrelevant to me. Blacklists are unjust, but they're not for the benefit of the people on them - they're for the people who use them.