In the 80’s I lived in NYC. At the time, enterprising hustlers had re-introduced the old Three Card Monte con game to NYC streets. Like wide ties and frozen yogurt shops, Three Card Monte always seemed to come back into fashion. Before you knew it, the streets were full of grifters running games. Whole blocks would be lined with these low-rent con men, standing behind cardboard boxes, tossing cards and asking the suckers to put their money on the red queen.
How could there be that many bad guys running Three Card Monte scams at one time? Well, there was plenty of money to be made, and it drew the criminal element like flies to honey. Grifters were making a lot of money at the con and every two-bit chiseler wanted their own piece of the action. Plus, there was very little needed to get in on the scam. The barrier to entry was low. You only need three playing cards, a couple of cardboard boxes for a...
Every day when I walk into work I’m greeted by an avalanche of data on new malware and Internet scams. The numbers in the last few years have been staggering. And when you think about the people behind the numbers it can get quite sad—people who’ve had their computers taken over, been scammed, stolen from, and just plain abused by cyberthiefs. It can get to you. A lot of days I don’t feel so good. Today I feel better. The FBI just announced they will arrest nearly 100 people involved in a phishing scheme.
The FBI calls it Operation Phish Fry. Operation Phish Fry means that someone in the FBI loves a bad pun. But the important thing is it means that a whole bunch of bad guys are going to jail. It’s not going to eliminate all phishing attacks (we detected 55,389 phishing Web site hosts in 2008 alone). But this latest move takes a lot of bad guys off the Internet and...
