I wonder if this explains the temporary signs I see on busy street corners proclaiming something like "Make $$$ working from home." (Or are these recruiters looking for telephone support help?)
I have family members who are always getting themselves involved in MLMs, and for the longest time, it was always some health supplement, or training course, or deregulated energy savings thing.
In more recent years, I’ve become convinced that some of the current MLMs (especially the crypto variety) are fronts for something shadier, and/or are pure scams using the MLM format to court the crowd that’s already into that stuff. Increasingly they can’t really explain what the actual product is, and it’s clear that they’re just greed/desperation traps.
The aha moment for me was realizing there's a set of scammers who scam other scammers by selling them the ability to scam marks.
It's why so many spam campaigns are completely broken (no link, nothing to even possibly send anyone any money) because the money was made when the spam gun was sold to someone, and they have no idea how to use it.
Cleaning those things off of streetcorners is a simple and rewarding way to beautify your city. Also a source of stiff wire that comes in handy for crafts where a coat-hanger isn't quite beefy enough. (I make all sorts of hooks and hangers and brackets out of it.)
Ah, I like that. The wire I get from old lawn signs is steel though, not quite so easy to hand-form around sharp corners like that. I use a steel pipe as a guide to bend it into S-hooks. Trying to match the dimension of a rectangular object would be tricky.
The funny thing is that they’re locally targeted, so if you go on vacation to a country with a low COL you’ll see those adverts on FB say “Make $200/month working from home!!!!”
The local "for sale" groups on Facebook have a huge problem with this kind of spam - posts advertising "Work from home for Amazon, $2k a week!" with a link that goes to to google pages link that does seven redirects. The next week the same account posts "Work from home for Fedex, $2k a week!"
I report them every time, and report the account that posts them, but Facebook seems unwilling to remove the scammers.
For anyone curious as to why crime in Russia seems to be so ingrained into the culture, this lecture from a finnish intelligence officer is quite informative.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kF9KretXqJw
Can't speak for any other Americans, but for me, the objection is rooted in having to watch a video at all. Reading the subtitles in a video is still more time-consuming than reading a transcript (which, mercifully, someone else here in the comments did provide).
The second reply got flagged for being rude, but it's right.
Not wanting to watch a video is valid. Complaining about "foreign language" when there are dubs, subtitles, and transcripts, all human translated, is not valid.
And did the first reply seriously get flagged to death for saying "Dear american"? I can't see any other words in that sentence that I could construe as offensive...
tl'dr, this seems to be the most important point but the video/transcript is full of insightful info:
> The third era that influenced Russian thought in a great manner is Mongol Russia. In the 1240s, the Mongols conquered Russia. They held Russia for 150 years. That time was cruel. There are a lot of words in Russian, related to torture, taxation and corruption, that come from the Mongol language. Dominance under personal authority was rooted in the administrative culture from the Mongols. That is, there is only one khan that leads. It is he who leads, no one else. Others are passive followers. That one guy leads and takes responsibility and the initiative. When the belief of divine legitimacy to lead is attached to this, the leader will appear as fairly tough in their world view.
> The corruption and cruelty also comes from the Mongol era. During the Mongol rule the only ways to survive were lying, corruption and violence. This still lives very deep in Russia’s strategic culture. When Mongol rule ended, the Mongols did not just pack their bags and disappear from Russia. Instead they mixed with the locals. So the traditions also stayed with the people. In particular, to the leading caste. The Mongols who had previously ruled the country merged into the ruling layers, which is still visible today.
The Mongols conquered an awful lot of places, but only with Russia are they used to explain "ingrained culture". Nobody's going to have a seminar about, say, Iran, and say that a large part of the way they are today is because of the Ilkhanate, and even the least-hinged China commentator isn't going to start invoking the Yuan and their permeating influence.
I mean yea, you can discount anything by comparing things that are not alike.
One thing to note about Russia is it is not defensible in standard sense of it's hard to cross this river or mountain. This lead to Russia making distance it's defense. You go and capture a bunch of different peoples with no relations to each other and use them as a meat shield if anyone attacks. Meanwhile you want for the harsh winter to wear them out. But this also comes as a cost, you cannot allow any of these outlying territories to gain too much power or they could become a threat to Moscow, hence you tend to see a massive amount of Russia under developed and depopulated.
The problem is, assumed “corruption and cruelty” could only be mostly local. Mongols came, instituted all fashions of levies, grant themselves the authority to accept local rulers, and went back. They didn't help to defend their vassals from foreign armies, but they chose their side in inter-principality campaigns, ensuring that the winner is under their control.
Funnily enough, this critical view matches the view of nationalistic thinkers of old who firmly placed the stereotype of “200 years of Mongol yoke” and widespread desolation into the education curriculum. There are doubts that is was that bad, especially for the elites that served Mongols well (and therefore made their regions actual parts of Mongol empire, which is an unthinkable perspective to nationalists describing them as “independent” and spiritually “unconquered”) However, in the era of the tsars it was used to explain how Russia is a “real” European country with unfortunate fate, and why its tsars are equal peers to European kings, and now it is used to explain how it totally isn't. The catch-all stereotype of despotic Oriental rule is quite clear here.
Broad claims about 'culture' set off alarm bells for me and is sort of a classic error of scholarship (not to hold a random HN post to the standard of 'scholarship' - my point is it's a signal of flaws).
Culture is very difficult to define, which makes it compatible with any claims - every listener perceive different meanings that make sense to us, so we can agree while meaning different things. Also, we have nothing specific to test. For example, if someone said crime is prevelent in Russia's economy, we might have data on the size of the black market, and data and information on how other factors generally affect black market size (such as, as a guess, authoritarian government, oligarchy, and of course poor delivery of goods and services by government and market).
Also, such claims are almost always made by outsiders, who know least about the 'culture' and at the same time are prone, being humans, to make broad, powerful claims about extremes in 'the other', who are slightly alien and thus might do anything.
Edit: I'm very familiar with the stereotype of Russian hackers, but stereotypes are very misleading. There are Russian government disinformation campaigns, where we do have specific claims and lots of evidence, but that seems like a different issue.
“Slowmads”, I.e. slow digital nomads who stay in places for a long while but ultimately see many different places, wouldn’t have much difficulty relating some “culture” things about one place vs. another. Often it’s plain to see. The causes maybe aren’t. But the effects are.
cultures do certainly exist. Consider for example the difference between high-context and low-context cultures.
As an anecdote about russian culture, a russian coworker once told me how amused a shopkeeper was back in russia when he asked them if they could please give him something. Where in russia it is typically not done (and its not at all rude to simply instruct a shopkeeper to give you something without please or thank yous, and certainly not asking someone if they can do something but just telling them to do it). The shopkeeper thought it was endlessly funny to just say no, as though it was an earnest request. Living in the UK had changed how my coworker spoke even in their native language.
Sure some may regard these as aspects of language still, but imo the fact that it affected how my coworker spoke even in their native language perhaps shows its more a cultural thing.
Now I WOULD be very wary of making cultural arguments as relates to crime. Imo its only really appropriate for analysing individual interaction.
That depends on how we define culture - some ways it's defined in people's minds don't really exist, some do. Also, to the extent something called 'culture' exists, we also can say that alien lifeforms exist, but that doesn't mean we know anything about them.
I'd ask, 'how are you defining it', but that seems unfair on HN: Answers are far too long and complex to explore here - I'm certainly not trying! :)
> russian culture
That seems like two words for an incredibly large, diverse, complex collection of - of what? how is that part of the sentence accurately written?
> an anecdote
I think this story supports my point about our reasoning about culture. We infer about all of Russia and its 'culture' (whatever that is), based on a second-hand anecdote.
Of course, social customs depend somewhat on time, place, participants, and many other factors (language, participants' ages, recent events (don't be too cheerful after a tragedy), etc. etc.) and we have an instinct that helps us grasp what will fit in any moment. But that is a very complex, undefined thing.
I agree with the video. Culture plays a huge role in countries’ trajectories even if people like to deny it because of fears of racism or being accused as one.
It doesn’t take much to observe that Russian culture is largely accepting of bullying, dog-eat-dog mentality, and cheating to get ahead…Putin and the leadership is a reflection of that.
I live in a country known for cybercrime of a different kind (Nigeria) and will never deny that culture plays a part. Our local culture is largely accepting of corruption and cheating to get ahead, which is one of the reasons many engage in crime.
Don’t get me wrong…I’ve worked with and continue to work with some wonderful Russians. But, it doesn’t change the fact that the culture needs reforms for the good of the country.
Of course, I’m not in support of profiling. I’ll never like to be profiled as a cyber criminal because I’m from Nigeria, but I’ll never deny that our culture has a big issue with rationalizing corruption and theft and needs reform to make us better-behaved.
Would you say that Buhari is representative of Nigerians in general? Is there even a national/universal Nigerian culture (a country created in whole cloth under colonialist ideology), or are you just talking about Lagos?
What about Trump and Biden in America? Point is, leaders don't often represent their people in toto, unless you count id as being the sum total of culture.
Buhari represents a large part of the Nigerians in the Northern states.
Trump represents a large part of Americans and so does Biden.
Democratic leaders are a representation of a significant percentage of their people. If you see an awful elected leader, then there's an awful large population that voted them in.
Have you looked at voting participation in Nigeria and America? These claims don't stand up to the data. Presidents represent certain small, usually-but-not-always radicalized, portions of a country, especially in FPTP/runoff systems.
In a country with 166 million registered voters [1] and over 90% of them voting for one of these two. Yeah, they represent a big part of the population.
Similarly, in Nigeria, Buhari represented the region with the biggest population, which is also the dumbest, most illiterate, poorest, and most corrupt. Not surprising their man was a dunce too.
Voting in blocks is a problem, but it's not the problem we're talking about. It's about voting participation. Only 3 in 10 Nigerians voted in the last election.
> Also, such claims are almost always made by outsiders, who know least about the 'culture' and at the same time are prone, being humans, to make broad, powerful claims about extremes in 'the other', who are slightly alien and thus might do anything.
True. The problem with insiders judging the culture is that they might be blind to it. But it’s best to not get caught up in narratives about “culture” and other such idealistic things.
> Edit: I'm very familiar with the stereotype of Russian hackers, but stereotypes are very misleading. There are Russian government disinformation campaigns, where we do have specific claims and lots of evidence, but that seems like a different issue.
There was a very strong interest in Russian government disinformation campaigns because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. And I don’t doubt that there is evidence of election interference. But the amount of money that was behind that seems like a pittance considering the big election advertisement industry.[1]
None should be surprised that you will find shady and underhanded things done by the more clandestine arms of some government. But we should be wary of people using that well-of-course-they-are as an outsized scapegoat to explain a big event like a federal election.
[1] Are run of the mill smear campaigns to be classified as “disinformation” or just regular ads?
It takes black Americans way longer than everyone else to wash and do their hair. (Guessing 2-5x longer for doing hair, and perhaps an order of magnitude longer to do a full wash.)
The cost to black women to get their hair done is generally more than any other group.
Almost all black women (and probably black men) have had to develop some coping mechanism for the number of non-black people who want (or at times, demand) to touch their hair.
Digression-- I remember a black doctor who had a coping mechanism for the number of patients who assumed he was the nurse and asked him where the doctor was. He would spin 360-degrees and then present himself to the patient again. :)
As for the sibling comment-- my first three sentences are falsifiable.
> (and probably black men) have had to develop some coping mechanism
My "coping mechanism" for the time before I just shaved it too short to matter was to simply say, "OK, go ahead." It's not a big deal and I don't have a problem with a natural curiosity.
[edit]
Asking is fine, "demanding" I would have a serious problem with.
It is entirely possible for a culture in an area/country to promote a behavior that many of the people there agree with. That doesn't mean that all the people in that area/country agree with (or exhibit) it, just that it's common.
For example, there is a fairly widespread / rampant "cheating/copying/don't-bother-learning" culture in a lot of schools in India, especially as it relates to software development. I've seen it brought up and stated as truth by people from that region over and over. There are also many VERY smart, skilled, devoted software developers from that are. I've worked with quite a few. However, because there _is_ that culture, the "noise" (bad developers) to signal (good developers) ratio is really high. And, when dealing with developers from that area (especially, from my experience, those at various contract/churn companies), you need to be careful about the work they're doing. You need to check to see it's being done well ... at least until you're familiar enough with the people/team that you can trust them.
Culture _has_ an impact; but that doesn't mean it should be assumed... just that it may mean you need to pay more attention.
It does seem to be leaking, doesn't it? Someone posted the hard-r here the other day, that feels uncommon, although I'm still a relative newbie in terms of HN.
Not really. OP said "now do black Americans" aluding to 7% of black men commit 60% of all crimes in the USA but merely stating this raw stat posted by government agencies including the fbi (which no longer publishes the stats btw since biden came into office), sends people up in arms and pretty much every reason is used to explain it other than focusing on this group culturally/educationally/etc. gpp is drawing attention to why did no one react the same way to "why russians commit crime" in the same way people react to why does this group commit crime.
I don't think that was their point. They are saying that talking about "crime" being a cultural element is wack and is usually a dogwhistle for plain racism and to justify hatred (I mean, it's part of their "culture" after all!). That's why saying "crime is part of black culture" is bad, and why saying that it's part of any culture should also raise eyebrows. If the same comment about Russian culture was about black culture, it would've been flagged (rightfully so).
I believe one of the reasons why so many people get away with the black culture dog whistle is American history kinda ignores the entire period between the end of the civil war and the start of WWII. We learn some about the Jim Crow era, but it's kind of neglected that slavery didn't stop at all. If you say 'Slavery actually ended in WWII", I do believe most people would be surprised. And it reframes the argument from slavery ended a long time ago, to things were really still total shit until your (black) grandparents generation (and not much better till the civil rights movements after that).
Now, turning this back to Russia, is seemingly Russia has always had the idea that it's outer population is a gigantic meat shield to protect Moscow. There are a number of authors and videos on this topic and I'm not going to link any particular ones. This said in the current war with Ukraine we see this in practice, as huge amount of the soldiers being used are not from the Moscow area, but the more minority areas farther away from the capital.
"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell is pretty interesting.
tl;dr: Sowell contends that the "black ghetto culture", characterized by violence, a lack of ambition, a dismissive attitude toward education, and a casual approach to work, is not inherent to African-Americans. Instead, he argues that it is a cultural relic of white southern 'Redneck' or 'Cracker' culture, which was brought to the South by immigrants from the more lawless regions of Britain.
These immigrants, according to Sowell, came from areas that were marked by a resistance to work, a lack of education, a predilection for violence, and a general disregard for the law. These cultural traits, Sowell argues, were absorbed by the African-American population in the South during the era of slavery and have been perpetuated in certain communities to this day.
Money quote: “And we're pleased with ourselves for seeing this influence on information, when, in fact, Bäckman's job (and that of people like him for Russia) is to draw our attention away as a diversion in order for the skillful information to take place somewhere else more effectively.”
I'd love to see a presentation like this about the US, in which it is casually mentioned in this lecture, that the US is engages in imperialism in a different way.
Its not even that I disagree per se. I simply would love to know more about how this thinking evolves within our allies (presumably, Finland is considered an ally to the US)
That would be a very interesting lecture. If anyone has something like this, send the link my way!
>(presumably, Finland is considered an ally to the US)
Finland only joined NATO in 2023; before then it was explicitly neutral. During the Cold War, East and West discreetly (and sometimes not so discreetly) fought for Finland's allegiance but, generally speaking, the Soviet Union had great influence over its foreign policy (cf. finlanization) while the West had great influence over its culture and economy.
For context, the theory of the (sadly recently passed) lecturer Martti J. Kari is somewhat controversial. He presents an extremely damning view that the Russian area culture and even genes have been fundamentally authoritarian and imperialistic for ages.
This also has some context in the Finnish culture, especially in the military, having quite a fearful and resentful view of Russia due to the wars during WW2, involvement in the civil war during WW1 and an oppressive era when Finland was a part of the tsarist empire.
This is not meant as an apology for anything that Russia's regime is doing and how it is.
Crime is integrated not because of some Mongols. But because of collapse of USSR, having grown during this time it was a struggle for survival and you are either with “majority” stealing, killing, robbing or with “minority”. At the very young age you were told not to tell on others that do crime, and you were educated by peers about prison life which was highly romanticized. It has changed dramatically in the past years. Now you can’t even buy a driver’s license where before it was the other way around. Nothing to do with Mongols…
Their adversaries change over time, and their early success breeds complacency.
For the first decade of their career they're really only facing people who will bust them if they're totally stupid and deliver themselves to the authorities practically gift wrapped. Because the flip side of most criminals being lazy is that most police are lazy. But then after a decade they wind up with someone at least mildly competent getting interested in them and they've left traces all over the place.
One thing I learned from a brief stint at a criminal law firm: criminals are usually pretty dumb. In TV and movies, they are usually depicted as clever, but the opposite is usually true. These are people that put themselves at huge legal and physical risk to make a similar amount of money to what they could get in a normal job.
Some of the exposure in these cases is due to the fact that you have cybercriminals who've been doing the same things for more than a decade. That is a very long time in which to make just a few key opsec mistakes, and also most RU cybercriminals back then did not take as much care to cover their tracks as they do today.
1. You learn about those and not the ones who successfully hide and keep a low profile
2. Proper security takes time and effort, so there is less time to devote to actual business, which means they are less likely to be successful at a scale that makes them widely known
We do hear about the ones with good opsec too, sometimes. For example, Alphabay(darknet drug dealing site) got rolled up, the #1 was going to jail for a long time before committing suicide, but the #2 - DeSnake, remained anonymous and free. Then, a few years later, he relaunched Alphabay and I'm fairly certain law enforcement still has no idea who or where he is.
the biggest ebook archive operator Anna is another. somehow she's managed to avoid capture despite being very wanted by the powers that be. and she posts on HN!
1. We've entered the full on "Oh shit, you don't need to be a hacker to do computer crime" phase of computer crime. Smash and grabs, just pay some disgruntled employee for their credentials, hire people to do the tech bits you need done - you don't have to be a 1337 hacker to get involved with this stuff. So they may not care or even be aware of much forum opsec.
2. Does Russia care about Russians ripping off other countries? How hard do you have to try to hide it if you just dump the username and move on when you're found out because there's not any repercussions from local law? I don't think anybody is going to go to Russia and get them any time soon.
If you are doing illegal stuff on the interwebs it might be benifital if your trails ends in North Korea or whatever. I've always thought all these "hacker in X" are scams from security consultants to get their face in media. I mean how can they possibly know.
because that's not their intention from the start. They act in a grey area and leave breadcrumbs and then don't create a new persona to continue because they want to continue using the reputation/connections they previously have or they slip up.
If they're already infamous, it's too late for them. This dude seems to have been a real amateur; he not only re-uses passwords, he re-uses usernames in his passwords. He puts his birthdate in a password. He doesn't have a clue. He seems to be a low-grade criminal who should have stuck to fencing stolen goods from a lockup garage, but stepped out of his league.
Often these aren't hackers, these are organizers of the process, or, simply put, “businessmen”. Stolen credentials and residential proxies come from one crowd, local resellers come from another crowd, etc. Also, you've believed in “traces” found by clever detectives only because it was hinted at. I suppose that most of the data comes from snitches, arrested users, and hacks, then gets washed and presented as “found” by some “service”.
What Krebs is suspiciously silent about is who provided (il)legal protection for the service. I guess this type of dirt on Russian officials is collected to a different folder inaccessible without clearance. Hence the framing of the lone Robin Hood story.
Maybe because doxxing is extrajudicial? What if Krebs was really unlucky and got the wrong person? Can't we at least wait for a conviction before trying to ruin some persons life?
Krebs is legally liable for what they publish, so if they are incorrect and it costs this person then they can sue for defamation and recover their losses from Krebs. This is how we hold people responsible for what they publish while avoiding prior restraints on speech.
Exactly. Krebs isn't an anonymous troll on 4chan, he's a well-respected computer security journalist publishing under his own name.
If he got it wrong, he'd be facing a lawsuit. He's also incentivized to retract and apologize in that case to preserve his credibility as a journalist. Very different story than an unaccountable anonymous troll with a grudge on Twitter/Reddit/4chan.
Just so we are on the same page. Here we "can't get a conviction" because the person resides in a country which doesn't care about the crime he committed. Not because the evidence does not pass the required evidentiary level.
> don't have the right to ruin a life.
Please explain to him how a life is ruined here?
> Any deviation from this principle leads to mob rule.
Where a mob is a single high profile individual with his reputation on the line, and this singular "mob" performed a through analysis and provides the full reasoning how he come to the conclusion. This "mob" rule does not look like the ones I usually hear about.
Last time I checked there were pretty strict laws governing what accusations the press can make and some fairly eyewatering financial consequences waiting when they overstep.
I disagree. Courts aren't the only places where decisions can be made. In fact, courts rely in information found and published in reports like this to make their decisions.
I feel I have a right to make my decisions based on such information also.
That doesn't mean the publisher shouldn't have liability here also. They are damaging someone's reputation, and should be held responsible if the claims are untrue.
But if the claims are true, then the damaged reputation is warranted. That's one of the consequences of doing something bad. You only have a right to have a good reputation if you don't do anything bad.
They can show up in the US court and file a lawsuit.
It’s realpolitik. It’s ok for Russians to steal from Americans, and likewise it’s ok for Americans to dox Russian criminals. There is no international law here, and even if there is it cannot be enforced and no one cares about. There might some moral high ground, but morals usually stay away from politics.
Because the person(s) in question are participating in illegal activities and lost their right to privacy?
The same reason why it’s considered acceptable to out the folks that participated in the watergate scandal, but not ok to out a confidential informant.
No? You mug shot often goes up on the internet at the time of arrest. Allegations against you are generally public leading up to the trial. The proceedings are public, and may be televised.
Even if not charged with a crime, if you do something shitty-but-legal and someone gets a video of it, you're not going to get control over that viral video.
>Loss of right to privacy generally comes after a conviction.
Not in the US. I can pull out my local newspaper right now and see a list of everyone who was arrested last week; long before they will be convicted of anything if they're convicted at all. For a lot of them they probably won't even be accused of anything because the other party won't press charges.
There is probable cause involved in an arrest, though. I think that's an important distinction between doxing and becoming part of the criminal justice system. You can certainly argue that there are problems with the system, but it's not the same as just doxing someone on the internet—not in a legal sense, or in a practical sense.
Journalists naming people as part of their work is a third category, and probably the one this falls under. It's dangerous territory, and Krebs stands to lose a lot (i.e. credibility, lawsuits, possible reprisals) by making this allegation if it turns out he didn't do his job right.
I know Krebs is very respected in the industry, but it makes me feel uneasy having evidence presented in public outside of a court hearing, a la reddit & the boston bomber.
Reddit was actively coordinating going after the wrong person which is an entirely different beast. Krebs is acting as an investigative journalist - he even gave them the opportunity to respond. Your local news stations don't send reporters out to try to talk to local scammers?
You make a valid point and have changed my mind. Investigative journalists do do that. I guess I don't really see Krebs as a journalist so it feels "wrong" to me, but when you put it that way, if it was Anderson Cooper on live TV showing this proof it wouldn't feel "wrong".
There is a difference between doxxing and investigative journalism. While the line can be fuzzy, I generally associate doxxing with an attempt to harass or intimidate, and investigative journalism with unveiling hidden information in a matter relevant to the public interest - and that information often includes concealed identities of suspected perpetrators.
Krebs doing his homework to reveal ringleaders of a criminal enterprise and showing how he got there is firmly in the "investigative journalism" category.
Obviously, there are unfortunate cases where some (often young and inexperienced) journalists shoot first and ask questions later, which can lead to harm, but Krebs has clearly kept the receipts here.
Funny story. In German „Krebs“ means cancer. And when he revealed the names and Adresses of Admins of a German Imageboard, the community started a fundraiser for cancer treatment named „Krebs ist scheiße“ or in English „cancer sucks“
Why do people care so much about doxxing these days?
In most places, doxxing is not illegal. In the places where it is illegal it's usually only when there's stalking/harassment intent behind it. Doesn't appear to be against the HN rules either.
Why is it on Hacker news when a "Twitter" topic comes up we get a bunch of people pontificating as "free speech maximalists" but when a journalism topic comes up people can call journalism "doxxing" without the "free speech maximalists" making an appearence and scolding them on the evils of censorship?
I would have thought a "free speech maximalists" would have a lot to say about every free speech topic, since they are apparently so passionate about free speech. Is using the neologism "doxxing", a term with a negative connotion, to describe journalism in line with their "maximalist" committment to free speech, for example?
Is this conversation about a journalist not an opportunity to remind us Voltaire said “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
> January 2021 posts on Verified show that Fearlless and his partner Universalo purchased the SWAT reshipping business from a Verified member named SWAT, who’d been operating the service for years.
> SWAT agreed to transfer the business in exchange for 30 percent of the net profit over the ensuing six months.
Good to know M&A deals happen in the illegal industries too :)
In the legal world, if someone reneges on the terms of their deal, you take them to court. I wonder how that gets settled in the illegal world...You send a hoodlum to beat them up?
“Hundreds of guys depended on Paulie, and he got a piece of everything they made. It was tribute, just like in the old country, except they were doing it here in America. Now all they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s what the FBI could never understand. That what Paulie and the Organization does, is offer protection for people who can’t go to the cops. That’s it. That’s all it is, they’re like the police department for wiseguys.”
In the short-lived Strike Force Five podcast (five late-night talk show hosts during the writer's strike), one of them talks about this. They mentioned how they tried and tried but couldn't get the garlic to actually do that.
When they got a chance to interview Scorsese about it, his response was "I made it up" :)
That, or some form of it, has traditionally been the method. Its only slightly different from the "legal" world, where you take them to court, and the court sends some one (the police) to enforce the courts decisions. Just in that case you have an (hopefully independent) third party to go through. Some more sophisticated criminal organizations actually have similar arbitration processes.
Depending on who you're dealing with, being sued could be vastly preferable to being on the bad side of certain illegal entities.
They might do anything from threaten you, blackmail, cyber sabotage, or worse, all the way up to literal murder. If I was a scammer, I'd probably focus on regular people over illegal entities, as the regular people probably have much more limited options for recourse.
Illegal businesses also probably have some decent experience in using escrow or other methods (above) of making sure illicit contracts are properly filled.
In other cases though they might just accept a loss as a form of shrinkage, like if an individual drop shipper didn't end up reshipping packages purchased with stolen credit cards. If you're doing your crime entirely online it might be easier to just let certain things go than to try and chase down the offender.
Old rule of thumb in Russia is that something has "Russian", "Slavic" and similar in their names - it's owned by Caucasians or Jews, of it has "American", or "Swiss", it's usually Russians :)
At least Boston Market started in/near Boston. Pittsburgh Tool is not even a company, just a brand for the same white-label tools as Milwaukee and Black and Decker. The whole tool product category has gone to crap since that started.
Why? He damaged citizens of a country that has an adversarial relationship with the country he is a citizen of and lives in.
Maybe, and I stress maybe, he might be the kind of guy that his government gives up in a deal for some other benefit. But that both, wouldn’t happen just because he was identified, and he’s unlikely to be someone the US would care about in a realpolitik deal given how small and obscure this scam was
> Constella found that years ago gezze@mail.ru was used to create a Vkontakte account from Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the southern region of Russia.
This picture of Magnitogorsk has always stuck with me:
This city looks awful in this photo but this is probably ideal living for urbanized people.
This was built as a public trans city so the narrow streets are for buses and trams. The apartment complexes aren't big blocky buildings like in say Manhattan, but L shaped to allow a large shady green area and to maximize natural light for all residents. Its full of green between the buildings and quite charming looking and walkable, especially considering some of those buildings are mixed use and allow for business as well:
The Soviets got so much right, its such a shame the car-centric suburban sprawl model won out in the West and percolated its way to Russia and parts of the East after the fall of the SU.
I did a thing on the internet that I personally hate which is to share a thing but not share my thoughts.
I think you are right, and I think the city looks cool, but it also seems to have an environment that could be described as oppressive (and in this image... cold)
I see others talking about Barcelona and I agree -- Barcelona looks similar. I assume less cold on average though.
I suppose modern man is trained to see any picture with any kind of caption on screen and instantly believe it. You don't have to do any research to learn that it is a satellite city to giant plants which appeared during rapid industrialization and were moved during the war.
> Magnitogorsk was to become a one-industry town modeled after two of the most advanced steel-producing cities in the United States at that time: Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
100 year old industry processes usually can't be easily updated to cleaner ones. Especially if no one has actually bothered to fix anything.
> Magnitogorsk was mentioned in the Blacksmith Institute's 2007 survey of the world's worst polluted cities, placed in the report's unranked list of the 25 most-polluted places outside the top ten.
It has only left the list of 20 most polluted Russian cities 5 years ago, when official pressure to do better started (and “better than before” is not “great”). Reportedly, one third of emissions was cut, which leaves the other two thirds.
Buildings from '30s and '50s are great if they have been well kept, which is rare because of lackluster approach in the late decades of Soviet era, and economic turmoil afterwards. Otherwise they can get quite nasty. Other option is major renovation, but developers are not interested in keeping low rise blocks (if they can't erect a 20 storey building at the same place). Local videos like this are easy to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d39wq7x9uk
What's more important, Russia is extremely centralized. There is not a lot one can do Most people with money, ambitions, or desires move to Moscow. Second option is St. Petersburg, third one is a small number of other big cities. Exactly that seemed to happen here.
i’m curious about the concept of a reshipping service itself: what does it achieve? is it an attempt to mask the seller’s identity, in that when LE intercepts something they can’t locate the sender from the address on the package? if so, how is it any better than the more traditional approaches (sending from the address of some arbitrary, but real store-front; sending from USPS dropboxes, etc)? maybe it’s only relevant in international shipments, as a way to bypass customs and import restrictions by making your cross-border shipments look like non-commercial stuff
between ordinary citizens? help me out here.
> maybe it’s only relevant in international shipments
That's mostly it. Buying merchandise from US websites that either don't ship international at all, or put increased scrutiny on purchases with us-payment-method + overseas-shipment.
And mostly to be able to convert stolen credit card numbers into physical goods. The US still does most purchases with just CC# + billing zip code + CVV2 number.
There are also legit freight forwarders, but they often also have a fair amount of customers (not most, but some) that use them for this same purpose.
OH, i thought the person wishing to remain anonymous was the seller — not the buyer. but if it’s buyers buying things with stolen CC’s, instead of sellers selling physically-stolen merchandise to regular ebay users (for example), then this makes more sense.
Many US companies refuse to ship internationally, so there are legitimate reasons for reshipping services to exist, especially for niche products or products that are too expensive locally. I have used legitimate reshipping services a few times as a Canadian.
However, these services are real businesses with permits operating out of warehouses with actual staff - not a network of people recruited from Craigslist to operate out of their houses.
I live in a small EU country, we have euros, mastercard/visa based credit cards, we're in the schengen, and somehow even within EU some companies won't ship to us (while shipping to eg 18. other EU countries). That includes amazon sellers!
If something is eg 100eur cheaper in germany than here, I'd use (and did use a couple of times) one of the reshipping companies, that take the package I ordered and for a fee, ship it to my country.
Same for US, a lot of stores don't ship outside of US, some due to not wanting to deal with that, some due to more practical reasons (wrong electric plug, etc., don't want to deal with customers complaining), and well.. use a reshipper for that too.
There was a previous post explaining the problem. Tldr: buy stolen card credentials, cash out into goods with resell value (eg electrics), ship those to countries with low enforcement and resell.
Now the shipping part is problematic, as it can be automatically flagged, is traceable. So goods are first shipped to residential addresses that don’t raise fraud alarm, then reshipped to destination country
Most online retailers grew wise to these scams years ago and stopped shipping to regions of the world most frequently associated with credit card fraud, including Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Russia.
The article gives a way more in depth view of how the reshipping scam works.
Essentially, they wait for a buyer of a product to come along to a listing and order it - they'll then buy it using stolen credentials, have it drop-shipped or reshipped to the end user.
Everyone but the person with the original card comes out ahead, which is then pushed to all of us via higher fees if they notice and report the fraud.
Your business is buying stuff with a stolen credit card, and selling it to punters.
You don't tell the merchant to send it to you, at your home address; you might get picked up! You hire someone you don't know (and who can't identify you) to take delivery of the goods at their address, and ship it on to the punters. When you're reshipper gets picked up, they can't give you away.
You don't have to be located in Russia for this to be useful; US citizens doing CC fraud have exactly the same incentive to use a reshipper, even when both the punter and the reshipper are also US citizens. Krebs seems to focus on Russians, possibly because he has his foot in the door of a number of online Russian crime communities.
I would expect if Krebs had information on a US operation he'd turn it over to the FBI first and report when the operation was busted.
I'm sure the Russians DGAF as long as the locals are getting their bribes, now if this guy ever leaves Russia he might get nabbed by an Interpol warrant.
I've heard that “first world” and “third world” are considered a bit too sensitive today, so let's say “world M” and “world N”. Anti-fraud systems in banks and payment processors form world M do not like withdrawal requests coming from world N, and vice versa. Only a small number of people travel between two worlds, so they can be pressed to make extra steps and go through extra checks. In addition, Russian banks work differently. From the very beginning of internet shopping era (happened well into mobile phone era) they enabled SMS verification. Almost any time you buy something from a local service, you are redirected to your bank page to enter the security code, then proceed back to the seller. This requires participation from mobile phone operators that alert the bank if owner of the number or device IMEI changes, and so on. After you typed the code from your phone, getting money back in case of fraud is your problem.
If money transfer between those areas is complicated, what can you do? You can buy expensive goods with local cards from local backdoored computers, and ship them to local addresses. Then they can be transferred to be sold on the other side. Extra money you spend on that are not yours anyway.
I'm no expert, but something tells me that deliberately not paying low level mules is a sign of: a) the scheme being near its end (sooner or later the audience would spread the word that “those guys never pay”, and new mules would be hard to find), or b) driving the competitors with low recruitment abilities out of the market. Maybe this leak is really a sign of some quarrel underground.
Glad to know that they have something in common with SBF, dumb enough to think their metadata tracks are invisible. For those not following the trial, SBF and company prepared pretend balance sheets that were fraud based using Google Docs and of course Google cloud keeps a record of who accessed it and when and what was changed...whoops
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIn more recent years, I’ve become convinced that some of the current MLMs (especially the crypto variety) are fronts for something shadier, and/or are pure scams using the MLM format to court the crowd that’s already into that stuff. Increasingly they can’t really explain what the actual product is, and it’s clear that they’re just greed/desperation traps.
It's why so many spam campaigns are completely broken (no link, nothing to even possibly send anyone any money) because the money was made when the spam gun was sold to someone, and they have no idea how to use it.
Are you nuts? Are you trying to kill us all? Or.. are you one of Them?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa8IrMWXtYc
I report them every time, and report the account that posts them, but Facebook seems unwilling to remove the scammers.
Not wanting to watch a video is valid. Complaining about "foreign language" when there are dubs, subtitles, and transcripts, all human translated, is not valid.
And did the first reply seriously get flagged to death for saying "Dear american"? I can't see any other words in that sentence that I could construe as offensive...
> The third era that influenced Russian thought in a great manner is Mongol Russia. In the 1240s, the Mongols conquered Russia. They held Russia for 150 years. That time was cruel. There are a lot of words in Russian, related to torture, taxation and corruption, that come from the Mongol language. Dominance under personal authority was rooted in the administrative culture from the Mongols. That is, there is only one khan that leads. It is he who leads, no one else. Others are passive followers. That one guy leads and takes responsibility and the initiative. When the belief of divine legitimacy to lead is attached to this, the leader will appear as fairly tough in their world view.
> The corruption and cruelty also comes from the Mongol era. During the Mongol rule the only ways to survive were lying, corruption and violence. This still lives very deep in Russia’s strategic culture. When Mongol rule ended, the Mongols did not just pack their bags and disappear from Russia. Instead they mixed with the locals. So the traditions also stayed with the people. In particular, to the leading caste. The Mongols who had previously ruled the country merged into the ruling layers, which is still visible today.
One thing to note about Russia is it is not defensible in standard sense of it's hard to cross this river or mountain. This lead to Russia making distance it's defense. You go and capture a bunch of different peoples with no relations to each other and use them as a meat shield if anyone attacks. Meanwhile you want for the harsh winter to wear them out. But this also comes as a cost, you cannot allow any of these outlying territories to gain too much power or they could become a threat to Moscow, hence you tend to see a massive amount of Russia under developed and depopulated.
The problem is, assumed “corruption and cruelty” could only be mostly local. Mongols came, instituted all fashions of levies, grant themselves the authority to accept local rulers, and went back. They didn't help to defend their vassals from foreign armies, but they chose their side in inter-principality campaigns, ensuring that the winner is under their control.
Funnily enough, this critical view matches the view of nationalistic thinkers of old who firmly placed the stereotype of “200 years of Mongol yoke” and widespread desolation into the education curriculum. There are doubts that is was that bad, especially for the elites that served Mongols well (and therefore made their regions actual parts of Mongol empire, which is an unthinkable perspective to nationalists describing them as “independent” and spiritually “unconquered”) However, in the era of the tsars it was used to explain how Russia is a “real” European country with unfortunate fate, and why its tsars are equal peers to European kings, and now it is used to explain how it totally isn't. The catch-all stereotype of despotic Oriental rule is quite clear here.
Culture is very difficult to define, which makes it compatible with any claims - every listener perceive different meanings that make sense to us, so we can agree while meaning different things. Also, we have nothing specific to test. For example, if someone said crime is prevelent in Russia's economy, we might have data on the size of the black market, and data and information on how other factors generally affect black market size (such as, as a guess, authoritarian government, oligarchy, and of course poor delivery of goods and services by government and market).
Also, such claims are almost always made by outsiders, who know least about the 'culture' and at the same time are prone, being humans, to make broad, powerful claims about extremes in 'the other', who are slightly alien and thus might do anything.
Edit: I'm very familiar with the stereotype of Russian hackers, but stereotypes are very misleading. There are Russian government disinformation campaigns, where we do have specific claims and lots of evidence, but that seems like a different issue.
As an anecdote about russian culture, a russian coworker once told me how amused a shopkeeper was back in russia when he asked them if they could please give him something. Where in russia it is typically not done (and its not at all rude to simply instruct a shopkeeper to give you something without please or thank yous, and certainly not asking someone if they can do something but just telling them to do it). The shopkeeper thought it was endlessly funny to just say no, as though it was an earnest request. Living in the UK had changed how my coworker spoke even in their native language.
Sure some may regard these as aspects of language still, but imo the fact that it affected how my coworker spoke even in their native language perhaps shows its more a cultural thing.
Now I WOULD be very wary of making cultural arguments as relates to crime. Imo its only really appropriate for analysing individual interaction.
That depends on how we define culture - some ways it's defined in people's minds don't really exist, some do. Also, to the extent something called 'culture' exists, we also can say that alien lifeforms exist, but that doesn't mean we know anything about them.
I'd ask, 'how are you defining it', but that seems unfair on HN: Answers are far too long and complex to explore here - I'm certainly not trying! :)
> russian culture
That seems like two words for an incredibly large, diverse, complex collection of - of what? how is that part of the sentence accurately written?
> an anecdote
I think this story supports my point about our reasoning about culture. We infer about all of Russia and its 'culture' (whatever that is), based on a second-hand anecdote.
Of course, social customs depend somewhat on time, place, participants, and many other factors (language, participants' ages, recent events (don't be too cheerful after a tragedy), etc. etc.) and we have an instinct that helps us grasp what will fit in any moment. But that is a very complex, undefined thing.
It doesn’t take much to observe that Russian culture is largely accepting of bullying, dog-eat-dog mentality, and cheating to get ahead…Putin and the leadership is a reflection of that.
I live in a country known for cybercrime of a different kind (Nigeria) and will never deny that culture plays a part. Our local culture is largely accepting of corruption and cheating to get ahead, which is one of the reasons many engage in crime.
Don’t get me wrong…I’ve worked with and continue to work with some wonderful Russians. But, it doesn’t change the fact that the culture needs reforms for the good of the country.
Of course, I’m not in support of profiling. I’ll never like to be profiled as a cyber criminal because I’m from Nigeria, but I’ll never deny that our culture has a big issue with rationalizing corruption and theft and needs reform to make us better-behaved.
What about Trump and Biden in America? Point is, leaders don't often represent their people in toto, unless you count id as being the sum total of culture.
Trump represents a large part of Americans and so does Biden.
Democratic leaders are a representation of a significant percentage of their people. If you see an awful elected leader, then there's an awful large population that voted them in.
In a country with 166 million registered voters [1] and over 90% of them voting for one of these two. Yeah, they represent a big part of the population.
Similarly, in Nigeria, Buhari represented the region with the biggest population, which is also the dumbest, most illiterate, poorest, and most corrupt. Not surprising their man was a dunce too.
1- https://www.statista.com/statistics/273743/number-of-registe...
Your only argument is to make up disparagement of people who disagree.
True. The problem with insiders judging the culture is that they might be blind to it. But it’s best to not get caught up in narratives about “culture” and other such idealistic things.
> Edit: I'm very familiar with the stereotype of Russian hackers, but stereotypes are very misleading. There are Russian government disinformation campaigns, where we do have specific claims and lots of evidence, but that seems like a different issue.
There was a very strong interest in Russian government disinformation campaigns because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. And I don’t doubt that there is evidence of election interference. But the amount of money that was behind that seems like a pittance considering the big election advertisement industry.[1]
None should be surprised that you will find shady and underhanded things done by the more clandestine arms of some government. But we should be wary of people using that well-of-course-they-are as an outsized scapegoat to explain a big event like a federal election.
[1] Are run of the mill smear campaigns to be classified as “disinformation” or just regular ads?
The cost to black women to get their hair done is generally more than any other group.
Almost all black women (and probably black men) have had to develop some coping mechanism for the number of non-black people who want (or at times, demand) to touch their hair.
Digression-- I remember a black doctor who had a coping mechanism for the number of patients who assumed he was the nurse and asked him where the doctor was. He would spin 360-degrees and then present himself to the patient again. :)
As for the sibling comment-- my first three sentences are falsifiable.
Edit: clarification
My "coping mechanism" for the time before I just shaved it too short to matter was to simply say, "OK, go ahead." It's not a big deal and I don't have a problem with a natural curiosity.
[edit] Asking is fine, "demanding" I would have a serious problem with.
For example, there is a fairly widespread / rampant "cheating/copying/don't-bother-learning" culture in a lot of schools in India, especially as it relates to software development. I've seen it brought up and stated as truth by people from that region over and over. There are also many VERY smart, skilled, devoted software developers from that are. I've worked with quite a few. However, because there _is_ that culture, the "noise" (bad developers) to signal (good developers) ratio is really high. And, when dealing with developers from that area (especially, from my experience, those at various contract/churn companies), you need to be careful about the work they're doing. You need to check to see it's being done well ... at least until you're familiar enough with the people/team that you can trust them.
Culture _has_ an impact; but that doesn't mean it should be assumed... just that it may mean you need to pay more attention.
Neoslavery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
Now, turning this back to Russia, is seemingly Russia has always had the idea that it's outer population is a gigantic meat shield to protect Moscow. There are a number of authors and videos on this topic and I'm not going to link any particular ones. This said in the current war with Ukraine we see this in practice, as huge amount of the soldiers being used are not from the Moscow area, but the more minority areas farther away from the capital.
tl;dr: Sowell contends that the "black ghetto culture", characterized by violence, a lack of ambition, a dismissive attitude toward education, and a casual approach to work, is not inherent to African-Americans. Instead, he argues that it is a cultural relic of white southern 'Redneck' or 'Cracker' culture, which was brought to the South by immigrants from the more lawless regions of Britain.
These immigrants, according to Sowell, came from areas that were marked by a resistance to work, a lack of education, a predilection for violence, and a general disregard for the law. These cultural traits, Sowell argues, were absorbed by the African-American population in the South during the era of slavery and have been perpetuated in certain communities to this day.
Sowell probably drew from Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, which argues that US culture arose from four different British subcultures.
Thanks, I never came across this usage before.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761...
Its not even that I disagree per se. I simply would love to know more about how this thinking evolves within our allies (presumably, Finland is considered an ally to the US)
That would be a very interesting lecture. If anyone has something like this, send the link my way!
Finland only joined NATO in 2023; before then it was explicitly neutral. During the Cold War, East and West discreetly (and sometimes not so discreetly) fought for Finland's allegiance but, generally speaking, the Soviet Union had great influence over its foreign policy (cf. finlanization) while the West had great influence over its culture and economy.
This also has some context in the Finnish culture, especially in the military, having quite a fearful and resentful view of Russia due to the wars during WW2, involvement in the civil war during WW1 and an oppressive era when Finland was a part of the tsarist empire.
This is not meant as an apology for anything that Russia's regime is doing and how it is.
It's relatively simple to use random credentials everywhere and to completely disconnect your hacker persona from RL.
Or is it that we only hear about those that do this...
For the first decade of their career they're really only facing people who will bust them if they're totally stupid and deliver themselves to the authorities practically gift wrapped. Because the flip side of most criminals being lazy is that most police are lazy. But then after a decade they wind up with someone at least mildly competent getting interested in them and they've left traces all over the place.
You only defend the ones who get caught! By definition you never defend one who hasn’t been caught doing something suspicious.
2. Proper security takes time and effort, so there is less time to devote to actual business, which means they are less likely to be successful at a scale that makes them widely known
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
1. We've entered the full on "Oh shit, you don't need to be a hacker to do computer crime" phase of computer crime. Smash and grabs, just pay some disgruntled employee for their credentials, hire people to do the tech bits you need done - you don't have to be a 1337 hacker to get involved with this stuff. So they may not care or even be aware of much forum opsec.
2. Does Russia care about Russians ripping off other countries? How hard do you have to try to hide it if you just dump the username and move on when you're found out because there's not any repercussions from local law? I don't think anybody is going to go to Russia and get them any time soon.
If they're already infamous, it's too late for them. This dude seems to have been a real amateur; he not only re-uses passwords, he re-uses usernames in his passwords. He puts his birthdate in a password. He doesn't have a clue. He seems to be a low-grade criminal who should have stuck to fencing stolen goods from a lockup garage, but stepped out of his league.
I imagine that date is in a lot of Russian passwords. That was the day of the '91 coup attempt against Gorbachev.
What Krebs is suspiciously silent about is who provided (il)legal protection for the service. I guess this type of dirt on Russian officials is collected to a different folder inaccessible without clearance. Hence the framing of the lone Robin Hood story.
If he got it wrong, he'd be facing a lawsuit. He's also incentivized to retract and apologize in that case to preserve his credibility as a journalist. Very different story than an unaccountable anonymous troll with a grudge on Twitter/Reddit/4chan.
Do you see that is likely to ever happen?
Just so we are on the same page. Here we "can't get a conviction" because the person resides in a country which doesn't care about the crime he committed. Not because the evidence does not pass the required evidentiary level.
> don't have the right to ruin a life.
Please explain to him how a life is ruined here?
> Any deviation from this principle leads to mob rule.
Where a mob is a single high profile individual with his reputation on the line, and this singular "mob" performed a through analysis and provides the full reasoning how he come to the conclusion. This "mob" rule does not look like the ones I usually hear about.
Most things in life are, thankfully.
I don't want to become the subject of a New York Times expose, either, but that's no reason to ban journalism.
I feel I have a right to make my decisions based on such information also.
That doesn't mean the publisher shouldn't have liability here also. They are damaging someone's reputation, and should be held responsible if the claims are untrue.
But if the claims are true, then the damaged reputation is warranted. That's one of the consequences of doing something bad. You only have a right to have a good reputation if you don't do anything bad.
It’s realpolitik. It’s ok for Russians to steal from Americans, and likewise it’s ok for Americans to dox Russian criminals. There is no international law here, and even if there is it cannot be enforced and no one cares about. There might some moral high ground, but morals usually stay away from politics.
Ask Fox News that one, I hear they are a little over 700 million short from that stunt.
It’s just that most people don’t feel a need to protect criminals.
The same reason why it’s considered acceptable to out the folks that participated in the watergate scandal, but not ok to out a confidential informant.
Even if not charged with a crime, if you do something shitty-but-legal and someone gets a video of it, you're not going to get control over that viral video.
And even if you luck out and don't get "doxed" as part of the arrest, you will be outed as soon as your formally charged.
So, no, at least in the US, privacy is not retained until conviction.
Not in the US. I can pull out my local newspaper right now and see a list of everyone who was arrested last week; long before they will be convicted of anything if they're convicted at all. For a lot of them they probably won't even be accused of anything because the other party won't press charges.
Journalists naming people as part of their work is a third category, and probably the one this falls under. It's dangerous territory, and Krebs stands to lose a lot (i.e. credibility, lawsuits, possible reprisals) by making this allegation if it turns out he didn't do his job right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZdwwpzvqHA
Krebs doing his homework to reveal ringleaders of a criminal enterprise and showing how he got there is firmly in the "investigative journalism" category.
Obviously, there are unfortunate cases where some (often young and inexperienced) journalists shoot first and ask questions later, which can lead to harm, but Krebs has clearly kept the receipts here.
Previously: https://itwire.com/business-it-news/security/infosec-researc...
Also the coinhive situation where he doxxed imageboard admins due to the coinhive connection of the previous owner.
Funny story. In German „Krebs“ means cancer. And when he revealed the names and Adresses of Admins of a German Imageboard, the community started a fundraiser for cancer treatment named „Krebs ist scheiße“ or in English „cancer sucks“
It also means plain old "crab".
In most places, doxxing is not illegal. In the places where it is illegal it's usually only when there's stalking/harassment intent behind it. Doesn't appear to be against the HN rules either.
Is this conversation about a journalist not an opportunity to remind us Voltaire said “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
At the end of the day "maximal" isn't near as far in the max directory as people reading the statement expect.
> SWAT agreed to transfer the business in exchange for 30 percent of the net profit over the ensuing six months.
Good to know M&A deals happen in the illegal industries too :)
In the legal world, if someone reneges on the terms of their deal, you take them to court. I wonder how that gets settled in the illegal world...You send a hoodlum to beat them up?
— Goodfellas (1990)
When they got a chance to interview Scorsese about it, his response was "I made it up" :)
That, or some form of it, has traditionally been the method. Its only slightly different from the "legal" world, where you take them to court, and the court sends some one (the police) to enforce the courts decisions. Just in that case you have an (hopefully independent) third party to go through. Some more sophisticated criminal organizations actually have similar arbitration processes.
They might do anything from threaten you, blackmail, cyber sabotage, or worse, all the way up to literal murder. If I was a scammer, I'd probably focus on regular people over illegal entities, as the regular people probably have much more limited options for recourse.
Illegal businesses also probably have some decent experience in using escrow or other methods (above) of making sure illicit contracts are properly filled.
In other cases though they might just accept a loss as a form of shrinkage, like if an individual drop shipper didn't end up reshipping packages purchased with stolen credit cards. If you're doing your crime entirely online it might be easier to just let certain things go than to try and chase down the offender.
Maybe, and I stress maybe, he might be the kind of guy that his government gives up in a deal for some other benefit. But that both, wouldn’t happen just because he was identified, and he’s unlikely to be someone the US would care about in a realpolitik deal given how small and obscure this scam was
This picture of Magnitogorsk has always stuck with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/hs0phj/magnitogo...
Pics for reference:
Barcelona: https://toposmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/logan-a...
Magnitogorsk: https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/751528006/d...
This was built as a public trans city so the narrow streets are for buses and trams. The apartment complexes aren't big blocky buildings like in say Manhattan, but L shaped to allow a large shady green area and to maximize natural light for all residents. Its full of green between the buildings and quite charming looking and walkable, especially considering some of those buildings are mixed use and allow for business as well:
https://imgur.com/sxgFLjO
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/magnitogorsk-russia...
The Soviets got so much right, its such a shame the car-centric suburban sprawl model won out in the West and percolated its way to Russia and parts of the East after the fall of the SU.
You get a chance to open windows on multiple sides to get actual airflow.
And more sun.
I think you are right, and I think the city looks cool, but it also seems to have an environment that could be described as oppressive (and in this image... cold)
I see others talking about Barcelona and I agree -- Barcelona looks similar. I assume less cold on average though.
> Magnitogorsk was to become a one-industry town modeled after two of the most advanced steel-producing cities in the United States at that time: Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
100 year old industry processes usually can't be easily updated to cleaner ones. Especially if no one has actually bothered to fix anything.
> Magnitogorsk was mentioned in the Blacksmith Institute's 2007 survey of the world's worst polluted cities, placed in the report's unranked list of the 25 most-polluted places outside the top ten.
It has only left the list of 20 most polluted Russian cities 5 years ago, when official pressure to do better started (and “better than before” is not “great”). Reportedly, one third of emissions was cut, which leaves the other two thirds.
Buildings from '30s and '50s are great if they have been well kept, which is rare because of lackluster approach in the late decades of Soviet era, and economic turmoil afterwards. Otherwise they can get quite nasty. Other option is major renovation, but developers are not interested in keeping low rise blocks (if they can't erect a 20 storey building at the same place). Local videos like this are easy to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d39wq7x9uk
What's more important, Russia is extremely centralized. There is not a lot one can do Most people with money, ambitions, or desires move to Moscow. Second option is St. Petersburg, third one is a small number of other big cities. Exactly that seemed to happen here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU
That's mostly it. Buying merchandise from US websites that either don't ship international at all, or put increased scrutiny on purchases with us-payment-method + overseas-shipment.
And mostly to be able to convert stolen credit card numbers into physical goods. The US still does most purchases with just CC# + billing zip code + CVV2 number.
There are also legit freight forwarders, but they often also have a fair amount of customers (not most, but some) that use them for this same purpose.
However, these services are real businesses with permits operating out of warehouses with actual staff - not a network of people recruited from Craigslist to operate out of their houses.
If something is eg 100eur cheaper in germany than here, I'd use (and did use a couple of times) one of the reshipping companies, that take the package I ordered and for a fee, ship it to my country.
Same for US, a lot of stores don't ship outside of US, some due to not wanting to deal with that, some due to more practical reasons (wrong electric plug, etc., don't want to deal with customers complaining), and well.. use a reshipper for that too.
Now the shipping part is problematic, as it can be automatically flagged, is traceable. So goods are first shipped to residential addresses that don’t raise fraud alarm, then reshipped to destination country
Russian Reshipping Service ‘SWAT USA Drop’ Exposed:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/11/russian-reshipping-servi...
Most online retailers grew wise to these scams years ago and stopped shipping to regions of the world most frequently associated with credit card fraud, including Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Russia.
The article gives a way more in depth view of how the reshipping scam works.
Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule - DEF CON 27 Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IT2oAzTcvU
Essentially, they wait for a buyer of a product to come along to a listing and order it - they'll then buy it using stolen credentials, have it drop-shipped or reshipped to the end user.
Everyone but the person with the original card comes out ahead, which is then pushed to all of us via higher fees if they notice and report the fraud.
Your business is buying stuff with a stolen credit card, and selling it to punters.
You don't tell the merchant to send it to you, at your home address; you might get picked up! You hire someone you don't know (and who can't identify you) to take delivery of the goods at their address, and ship it on to the punters. When you're reshipper gets picked up, they can't give you away.
You don't have to be located in Russia for this to be useful; US citizens doing CC fraud have exactly the same incentive to use a reshipper, even when both the punter and the reshipper are also US citizens. Krebs seems to focus on Russians, possibly because he has his foot in the door of a number of online Russian crime communities.
I'm sure the Russians DGAF as long as the locals are getting their bribes, now if this guy ever leaves Russia he might get nabbed by an Interpol warrant.
If money transfer between those areas is complicated, what can you do? You can buy expensive goods with local cards from local backdoored computers, and ship them to local addresses. Then they can be transferred to be sold on the other side. Extra money you spend on that are not yours anyway.
I'm no expert, but something tells me that deliberately not paying low level mules is a sign of: a) the scheme being near its end (sooner or later the audience would spread the word that “those guys never pay”, and new mules would be hard to find), or b) driving the competitors with low recruitment abilities out of the market. Maybe this leak is really a sign of some quarrel underground.