Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase?
Reminds me of Lebowski asking the cops about his Credence tape.
Legislation can be changed so people are considered responsible for the abuse that comes from their network unless they can pass the buck to someone else. This will quickly cause those Windows XP machines to fall off the internet unless their owners fancy constantly being bogged down in legal trouble.
> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase?
The alternative is effectively saying that theft under 20 bucks is decriminalized?
Those who tried to convince a police officer to investigate a bike theft can tell you that the threshold is actually higher.
Personally, I think it's reasonable to care about such things, and to try to do something about it. If no-one cares or tries, then sucky people will just suck even more.
Is there any reason why you did change mail away from Fastmail after such a long time and now use Google as Mailserver?
"...He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point "Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums". He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem..."
Seems like it's possible but not feasible to build a pipeline to scale out that sort of behavior.
Amazon should be able to keep on top of fraud easily, twice the sales means twice the revenue means they can afford twice the fraud checks, if they want to. That fake $30 "2tb microsd card" puts $30 of real money in their bank account.
But for something like Twitter, revenue is only vaguely related to number of tweets. That "elon musk wants to give you free dogecoin" tweet doesn't make them a cent.
The alternative is that we allow businesses to externalise those costs onto society.
Sure, why not? And if you're at the scale is Blizzard I'm sure it's a lot more than $20.
We're collecting all kinds of information these days. Surveillance capitalism is a common term for it. Data is gold they say. So why not give that data to people that can use it to stop crime?
What exactly can FBI do about them?
1) There's certainly cards coming from non completely sanctioned countries. This means legal pathways.
2) If fraud is prevalent and these numbers can be tracked it makes for better policy decisions. It's not uncommon knowledge that we don't have the best privacy and security. This is at least ammo to do something about it.
Do you only do things that you get paid to do?
They offer MFA and that's all they should have to do.
> There is 0 incentive for them to care other than doing the bare minimum because it's not their problem, it's the credit card company's problem.
I don't buy this and it sounds incredibly myopic. If it wasn't "their problem" then they wouldn't be doing anything about it. Which the OP talked about. So they aren't just taking the money and letting the credit card companies handle it, that doesn't even make any sense. Credit card companies have to get the money back. Honestly, it sounds cheaper to report it if reporting it leads to a significant reduction because you then have to pay fewer people to deal with this issue and process far fewer charge-backs. It's not much work to do (literally create a program to automate filling out a forum to the gov). We're arguing over less than a week's amount of work.
Plus, it's the right thing to do. Idk about you, but money doesn't run my entire life. Letting it seems incredibly myopic as well. Money is just a tool to help me better my life but it sure isn't the only way to do that. And if we're not trying to do "the right thing" then the fuck do we even have a society for? Seriously, please reconsider your actions, because you're enabling the shittiness in society. I'm not saying you gotta be a saint, but if there's a pretty cheap action you can do to make your society any bit better, just do it.
To take an analogy I'll mention the drug war. The main target was always low level drug dealers and users. They're easy to arrest and easy to say you're doing something. But they are fairly inconsequential to the business of selling drugs and thus the availability on the streets. But it's orders of magnitude harder to go after the root of the problem. I don't want to detract this conversation with the other aspects or conspiracies (real or contrived), but just focus on the incentive structures. I think the same is here. Blizzard gets no short term reward for reporting fraudulent activity. It's hard to know if they get long term. But at the end of the day it would be the right thing to do.
That's what matters. Doing the right thing. Move fast and break things it's a great strategy. But it can't be used in isolation. If it is you're left with a trail of destruction which never gets cleaned up. It's hard to quantify objectives and so every objective function is misaligned. You need to rely on humans to see through that and correct the course as best they can. You need both the people pushing to move fast and the people pushing to slow down and repair. There's a harmony in that competition. Pick your camp but recognize that there's value in the other one too.
This might not be too different from the payment anti-fraud industry (which is just varying degrees of snake oil). There are solutions that can be implemented such as actually strong two-factor authentication that could cut down on payment fraud dramatically but this would significantly reduce demand for this industry, so a lot of the field has a monetary incentive to keep the underlying primitives not so secure as to keep demand for their snake-oil.
In a similar way, a huge amount of this fraud would disappear if we took more known-to-be-effective measures to combat poverty (because many of these fraud techniques rely on hiring a whole bunch of desperate people to help keep it going): things like providing housing, single-payer health care, and universal basic income.
No argument here, and it should be unsurprising I agree, since I'm arguing to not go after users. But also remember we can say the same about internet fraud. I'm all for addressing the roots of the problem. Big fan of ensuring there's a floor to living standards. But admittedly that's not the whole problem and fixing these things is incredibly complex. But I would say treating the addiction is a different side since that's downstream of production. Though complex because we do need to produce some drugs but we shouldn't need to spill blood to do so.
Indeed—that's basically my point, too! :-D
>And if I ask who do I trust more, my local reputable electronics shop (Memory Express, B&H Photo, etc.), I trust my local reputable electronics shop more. Not only are they less likely to sell me a counterfeit than Best Buy, in the event that they do sell me a counterfeit, the service is likely to be better.
An international, multi-government taskforce is one solution, potentially. Maybe not. For the problem presented at the top of the article, shopping locally seems like an easy win in comparison.
It's even less trivial when corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized (see dark patterns, or companies outright taking money for no/sub-par service). Suddenly starting to prosecute fraud would inconvenience some deep-pocketed entities.
what would be good incentives to make companies like blizzard start reporting fraudsters?
I am thinking along the line: companies can pay $X to make a report, and will receive $X5 if that reports leads to a fine. And they have to pay additional $X10 if that reports turns out to be frivolous. (If the report appears to be valid, but doesn't result in a fine, than they get no payoff).
My worry is that bad incentives would lead to over-reporting or some other bad thing.
Subsequently, the industry of fraud is generally lucrative and is thus constantly growing.
When I worked at Blizzard, there were many mechanisms in place to spot fraudulent credit card transactions and cancel them before they actually billed the card holder, but there was no process for reporting the fraudsters to prevent them doing the same thing again tomorrow.
This is probably the same strategy that every company does, because there is no practical action any company can do to try make fraudsters accountable and thus discourage them from simply trying again.
So the problem of fraud is getting ever bigger and increasingly unmanageable and out of control.
The problem is a non-trivial political one, governments need to create task forces to work to reduce the size of the fraud industry, perhaps by catching fraudsters and making them accountable.
The problem is even harder than simple political will though, because it’s cross jurisdictional, meaning governments of different countries all need to work together on this.
This may seem impossible at the moment, but I believe until it is achieved fraud is only going to get increasingly worse.