A pitiful outlook for scammers

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 15 Aug 2008 Posts: 3

An interesting research paper has been recently released regarding phishing (and it very much applies to 419 scams equally).

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/Papers/PhishingAsTragedy.pdf

A quick summary:
There is a finite amount of money which can be scammed (say, a success rate of 5% times everyone who has email access.)

Since there is no barrier to entry, more scammers turn to scamming, thus each scammer takes a smaller slice of the pie. So far, this is just market economics.

Now the tragedy comes in because every time the scammer is successful, the victim has less money (or in some occassions, may become wiser), so the actual finite pool is decreasing.

If scammers keep taking "fish" out of the water faster than the natural replenishment rate (new victims connecting online), this "natural resource" will crash like any other overharvested resource.

Unfortunately, since scammers don't have any good licensing program to ration the catch and prevent overfishing of victims. (In fact, each scammer works for his/her own selfish ends, and will just cast out wider and wider nets as the resource runs low.) This further exacerbates the problem, and they are going to die of their own success.

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 8:26 pm

But it does mean that we will get more lads trying to follow our leads and increase our fun in baiting them!!

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

419pwnter wrote:

Unfortunately, since scammers don't have any good licensing program to ration the catch and prevent overfishing of victims. (In fact, each scammer works for his/her own selfish ends, and will just cast out wider and wider nets as the resource runs low.) This further exacerbates the problem, and they are going to die of their own success.

Why is this "unfortunate"?

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 15 Aug 2008 Posts: 3

JMRazor wrote:

Why is this "unfortunate"?

It's a sarcastic unfortunate, to keep in line with the title of the paper.... what a tragedy Smile

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Got it, thanks.

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 8:54 pm

But new seas of fresh fish are opening up elsewhere in the world, so overfishing is still far away Sad

They might even start ignoring us in the end as we don't type Chinese Laughing

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 9:20 pm

No new fish in the sea? I helped set up a computer lab in a Senior Citizen's Center and have taught there. These fish have never heard of phishing or 419 scams. Yes, this is anecdotal but I positive that the number of users on line is increasing.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 15 Aug 2008 Posts: 3

What I have typed above is just a very light summary. There are detailed projections on internet traffic and new sources of "fish" coming online in the paper itself, and how this is not remotely sufficient to prevent the demise of the scammers.

Two quotes of interest:

"Since Gartner [13] estimates that 66% of the population had received phishing emails it is hard to argue that there's a large uncontacted population that represents a profitable opportunity."
[13] Gartner. Phishing Survey. 2006. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=498245.

"Another amusing example of the trajectory of a quotable but poorly sourced claim (that internet traffic was doubling every hundred days)
is examined by Odlyzko [6]."
[6] A. Odlyzko. Internet traffic growth: Sources and implications. Proceedings of SPIE, 2003.

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 10:08 pm

Some people get scammed over and over again, they must like the excitement and anticipation of always being about to become fabulously rich.

Maybe the lads should use nets with bigger holes in the mesh.

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 10:35 pm

But it's all the same, most money of scammers is spend in the country on real estate or on western products to boost our economy a bit and bring the money back home, just a secondary money flow that helps us to stay a float Laughing

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 11:09 pm

Like others have said, new markets are opening up that negate any projected reduction. Then you have the fact that the lads are pretty resourceful and will adapt their methods to deal with any supposed famine. A lot also rests on the idea that more people will turn to scamming.
Way too many variables to make the claim that scammers will soon become a dying breed.

419 is with us for a long time yet.

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