Interesting anecdote.
Some of us may try to claim the moral high ground, but we aren't fully in control - not until much later in life.
If you are a teen and all your friends do this, you'd be a sucker for paying the "full" (read: non-stolen) price. Because they don't fully realize what's involved in getting these 'goods' to them.
From the article:
> “When I was running the service, I didn’t really care because I didn’t know my customers and I didn’t know much about what they were doing with it,” Ngo said. “But during my case, the federal court received like 13,000 letters from victims who complained they lost their houses, jobs, or could no longer afford to buy a home or maintain their financial life because of me. That made me feel really bad, and I realized I’d been a terrible person.”
He may be a psychopath and faking it. But probably not. When harm happens that far away from you, it's easy to brush aside.
I'm from one of the countries in your list - won't specify which so as not to invite flames. Suffice to say that there's a baseline level of corruption that's tolerated, if not encouraged. Tax evasion, pirated software, contraband, you name it. The population is really abused by the government (very high taxes, lots of bureaucracy, terrible public services, corrupt officials) so I guess that's how some people survive. And then it creeps into other areas in their lives via network effects. That's one of the reasons I left.