Somali Pirate: I made $2.4M From Ransoms in 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Somali Pirate: I made $2.4M From Ransoms in 2010

foxbusiness.com

21 pointsjkuria15 comments

I never guessed there would be pirate VC, I suppose money follows any profit.

This link sparked one hell of a conversation in #startups @ freenode. We mainly talked about prevention, and it turns out that Xe (formerly Blackwater) has tried a Honey Pot tactic. Anyway, the guys in the channel basically came t the conclusion that there aren't strong enough economic incentives for mercenaries to deal with the pirates.

Blackwater/mercenaries don't go into the situations where they can really be hurt. One thing is to shoot unarmed civilians and the other - pirates whose "berserk" state is fueled by millions of dollars and the fear/risk brain center is dumped by khat (google khat)

He should enjoy the money while he's still breathing, which won't last as long as he thinks it will.

I doubt that's true, as he didn't participate in most of the hijackings. If he keeps that up, at worst he'll lose money, and the only risk is getting at the wrong end of a gun in a dispute over money.

Some countries have special forces operating in Somalia hunting these guys down. Parading and bragging about how much money he's earned makes him a target.

the guy participated only in one hijacking, in all the other cases he was an investor.

So he's an angel?

    "The South Korean and Russian rescue operations did not affect us,
    but ... we must take revenge," Yare said. "We shall be killing Russian
    and South Korean crew until their navies stop attacks against us."

Anyone want to bet on how long it will be between the time they kill a Russian or South Korean crew, and the world gets serious about stopping the pirates?

i wouldn't be optimistic here. 3 weeks ago there were killed 4 Americans. Nobody would care about crew of 8-10 Russians or Koreans ... even Russians and, i would venture to guess, Koreans as well.

Stopping such a massive piracy (i.e. decimating it to rare occurrences) is easy. But like with simple plastic credit cards vs. complicated microchip, etc... - the current losses is less than the cost of changing the situation.

In case of piracy there is also additional issue of separation of who is paying or to pay - piracy losses are carried by private business, where is any action against the piracy would involve weapons - thus it is to be carried and paid by the government(s).

Constitutional method to fix this is "letters of marque and reprisal" - as used against the Barbary Pirates.

when I first read the headline I thought it was going to be a "How-To" blog for all you would-be pirates

how long before copycat operations start?

With all this pirate VC money going around, I sense a pirate bubble.

"bubble" - when an investor willingly drops stable 300% profitable business (his drug trade in this case, which in Somali is as conservative business as Safeway here) to invest into that new opportunity.

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