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Comment by cal5k | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting part for me: "Furthermore, the defendants leased more than 650,000 Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses, assigned multiple IP addresses to each datacenter server, and then fraudulently registered those IP addresses to make it appear that that the datacenter servers were residential computers belonging to individual human internet users who were subscribed to various residential internet service providers."

That's... really smart. A lot of companies use services like MaxMind to do this. I wonder how difficult it is to get a GeoIP data correction request approved: https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-data-correction-request/

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Scamming at that level requires so much skill and hard work that you have to wonder why they don't start a legitimate business to make more money with less risk? I suppose for some it's just for the thrill.

I think because it’s a different type of risk. With your own business the risk is that you fail and don’t make money. With a scam you can make a bunch of money for a long time before the risk of being caught ramps up. You’re quickly (relatively) rewarded instead of agonizing over whether or not you will be.

Well, they all live in Kazakhstan and Russia. It may not be so easy to convert talent into legitimate business success, particularly when "cybercrime" (god I hate that word) is often encouraged in places like Russia so long as it targets non-Russians.

I don't think people in civilized countries even remotely understand the level of desperation poorer people from those countries go through. VICE's documentary about krokodil is actually quite good. Except when people watch it they think it's about someone particularly far away from the average - but it's not.

The chance of getting a visa to move out or starting a business, which can only be oriented towards civilized countries if you'd like to make any money at all... Is particularly low.

IT is one of those areas which you can still learn particularly well without any access to textbooks or academia.

Same question for guys running botting shops on level that even Google and Co. can detect (ones who keep cracking the latest captchas, run custom VMs for evading JS performance profiling, and etc)

I guess, they have one thing in common, a lot never ever thought of traveling abroad. While some people I knew in that scene 10+ years ago had perfect English, in their mind "the abroad" is such a distant place, and obscure place that they think is totally beyond their reach, that they don't even bother toying with an idea of moving abroad.

And also notice, the guys indicted are rather old, and probably were in the scene since the era of first internet ads companies, and doing ad fraud long before even google was a thing

I have a friend who's in jail for ~14 years now after hitting a third strike law with a fraud of ~ 30 million dollars.

Long story short, he did it because he was really good at it and got better over time. You don't knock something like this out without having done a lot of smaller stuff first, and by the time you get to this level of skill and sophistication, it's because it's easier to do this, and the skills you've built up don't apply well to real world jobs, or if they do at all, they don't pay nearly as much as you can get paid by running the scam, and with all that skill and experience, the risk of getting caught does go down quite a bit.

why did Jay-Z sell cocaine? some entrepreneurs are born into less opportunity.

Going back to 2005 or so leasing and announcing entire CIDR prefixes was pretty popular for spammers.

A /19 would run you about 8k/m and I assume maxmind updates are included in the cost.

I have no citation for this, but SORBS and friends blacklisted /24 by default. If you had enough servers you could send enough email to turn a profit before your /24 was blacklisted. Only until you got to SORBS level 3 was your prefix blocked. Of course they would delist you for 2000/day.

1. You don't feel like offensive hacker while running legitimate business.

2. Legitimate business requires more than just talent! If you don't know people in power, don't have the required connections, good luck getting necessary permits etc..

3. Starting capital due to compliance requirements is much higher! It pretty much excludes everyone who isn't coming from an Ivy league.

4. There is a very high probability that even if you've all the resources you might fail.

5. Government officials might as well take over your company anytime. (In former Soviet countries and corrupt third world countries, government officals do takeovers your business)

Simply money, isn't enough in itself. VCs also bring top level connections, including people who will serve as executives in future with intimate connection to Goverment.

These guys don't have anything else other than cheap labor (which will do anything provided it doesn't have to do with messing with the authorities of the countries they are living in) and their own skill.

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