Recently, a couple of doctorates from Carnegie Melon conducted a study over a 7-month period.  In that period, 2.4 Gb of chat information was logged and an estimated $37 million worth of fraudulent credit card transactions were recorded.  While it seemed this study primarily focused on IRC communications, they brought up an ironically amusing way to disrupt these illegal business ventures.  First, sell credit card information and dramatically lower prices than reputable competitors (i.e. predatory pricing) and then when people pay, just don’t give them anything.  Who knows, it may even get to the point where the criminals will be going to legal authorities stating that they have been scammed .

To reduce cybercrime, the government may want to consider the tactics employed by the music industry against copyright scofflaws, suggests Jason Franklin, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Franklin has co-authored a paper with Adrian Perrig, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Vern Paxson, associate professor at University of California, Berkeley; and Stefan Savage, assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, which explores the underground hacker economy.

The paper, “An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Internet Miscreants,” measures and analyzes the Internet’s black market for information. It is based on seven months of observation, from January to August 2006, during which 2.4 Gbytes of Internet Relay Chat data was logged. IRC is one of the main communication channels of cybercriminals who participate in credit card fraud, identity theft, spamming, and phishing.[more]

Tags: Identity Theft