Alternatively you need real criminal gangs - dozens of people willing to walk up and down a London street withdrawing 5k at a time from a 1000 Pre-prepared cards and put the money in their rucksacks. They don't come cheap. And its still cash and still in the U.K.
Get Amazon to send you two dozen laptops to the same address with two dozen cards. All as "gifts". Yeah right. Now you gotta sell them - fences run at 10% if you are lucky.
The lowest effort are simple impersonation for loans, but still you have to take the money and move it somewhere. Into cash? Into the phillipines? See above problems. Open a credit card account? How to intercept it and the PIN number sent by post?
All in all, it's actually pretty darn hard to take personal details and monetise at the "real money" level. These things stop being scalable. You could probably fund a student lifestyle off any combination of the above but millions - not really.
Cf interesting Microsoft paper on this a few years back
These criminals trade data because it makes them money, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a makrket.
Sensitive personal data is necessary but not sufficient to rip someone off. And if you want to try to make a living ripping people off, there is even more business overhead, making the cost of sensitive personal data an even smaller portion of overall operational costs.
From the point of view of the thief, our personal data is a vital but cheap input into an operation that tends to have very high security costs, viciously expensive liquidity issues and terrible personnel problems, among other more quotidian business headaches.[1]
I suggest trying to think like a crook now and then. Trying to try on other people's lives is a useful way of shaking up one's thinking habits, empathy (don't confuse with sympathy) is always useful, and it can help you keep yourself more secure.
[1] I am leaving out things like several potential fates far worse than bankruptcy and related issues because they aren't opex-related, but they probably do effect retirement planning.
I feel like you're arguing that dirt is worth as much as the farm that one could build with it.
For example, that 40cpm is to reach a pool of <1000 users who are in charge of purchasing for networks of hospitals, and my ads are for MRI machines. 3rd party data is unbelievably valuable, probably $1.5 million of my budget goes to data costs alone.
This is well understood by the adtech community and even the flashy new "ABM" companies will tell you the same. 3rd party data is universally terrible. At best, it'll work at scale (of millions) on general demographic details but will definitely not recognize 1000 people on the open web.
That kind of list might work on Linkedin or Facebook with email targeting but it would be easier to focus on niche trade sites without any data, or just use a direct sales team. That $1.5M in data you're paying for would have much better ROI with a good VP of sales.
Sometimes you can prod your potential customers into action.
If someone tried to do that to me, I’d report the attempt to the company lawyer, and I’d doubt the quality of the thing they were selling was as good as the quality of the thing the other poster was advertising.
Black market data is worth way more because it's often more personal than just demographic markers and interests, and can potentially lead to large sums of money.