Stopping them entirely is impossible, but you can render them so ineffective by trapping them them in a cage of uselessness that they’ll spend hours, days and weeks trying to defraud people who never see their messages.
This used to work, but scammers added a layer of indirection to fix it. Now, most scams are done by people who are, effectively, subcontractors for the scammers paid on commission. There is a very high turnover of these people, because they try to run the scams for a month, discover that they’re not making any money, and give up, but by then the scammer has recruited a replacement. Each of them is paid a cut of the scammed money, so the scammer wins as long as some of them are making money and doesn’t care that most of them are making a loss.
The [Perl] site had no database. It ran entirely from text files that used a directory structure and file names to create it’s own version of indexes. While this is an easy thing to gawk at the site was incredibly fast. Perl excels at working with text files.
I love this. There is more than one way to do it, even for storing data!
This used to work, but scammers added a layer of indirection to fix it. Now, most scams are done by people who are, effectively, subcontractors for the scammers paid on commission. There is a very high turnover of these people, because they try to run the scams for a month, discover that they’re not making any money, and give up, but by then the scammer has recruited a replacement. Each of them is paid a cut of the scammed money, so the scammer wins as long as some of them are making money and doesn’t care that most of them are making a loss.
What do you read to keep up with trends in fraud practice?
I hang out with folks in the Cambridge Cybercrime Center, though I haven’t much since the pandemic. I hope to start again soon…
Wow, it’s like online fraud is basically a shadow economy now. I’ve worked in payments but had no idea scammers had gotten this advanced.
Not only is it a full shadow economy, but fraudsters have job boards and offer benefits competitive with FAANGs. 😭
I too have spent years of my life fighting scalable fraud.
I love this. There is more than one way to do it, even for storing data!
Yep. My business runs off a couple of CSV files. I don’t bother with an RDBMS, one less thing to maintain and upgrade.
IIRC this is also how HN works.
was it the owner who told him he wasn’t working hard enough or some manager? he did a lot of good but that part bothers me.
It was during his review, so most likely a manager.
Sounds like a manager, and more evidence for the saying that people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers.
The previous programmer being out of contact is a red flag.