Cringely's Plan To Stop Phishing: Bounties!

from the vigilanteism-is-so-in-these-days dept

Does Robert Cringely not use Google? In his latest column, he starts out by claiming that people aren't being arrested and sent to jail for phishing. A quick Google search turns up more than a few such stories, including a few from right around these parts. Still, the rest of his column goes on to discuss how to solve the phishing problem. In his mind, the problem is that no one is really going after phishers, so maybe we should make everyone go after phishers. In other words, set up a bounty system that where companies pay people who track down phishers. A bounty system, eh? Wonder where that idea came from? Will he agree to quit his column if it doesn't work a la Lessig's promise on the spam bounty? The problem with a bounty system in this case, is that the frontline people involved in phishing scams are pretty much expendable. Phishing is mostly done by organized crime groups. If some bounty hunters track down some kids sending out spam or hosting a bogus website, it won't really matter to the real criminals, who will just find some new kids to handle the dirty work. And, of course, there already are some vigilantes trying to track down phishers, and it's just made the phishers shift strategy. It's a nice idea, but it doesn't seem likely to really solve the problem.
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  1. identicon
    dorpus, 27 May 2005 @ 7:53am

    What about Fishing Problems?

    In the Eastern Sea, the Korean Coast Guard boarded a Chinese fishing boat that was illegally fishing in Korean waters. However, the fishermen used steel pipes to overpower the coast guard, injuring 4 of them, throwing them into the sea, and getting away.

    The same fishing boat came back to the same place two days later, and this time the Korean coast guard used overwhelming force to arrest the fishermen, presumably beating the crap out of them.

    If marine wi-fi was freely available, could fishermen like these get sneakier? Could they use satellite services to track the coast guard from beyond radar range, or maybe mob coast guard vessels with overwhelming force and sink them at sea?

    http://japanese.joins.com/article/article.php?aid=63962&servcode=400§code=400

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    h.novus, 27 May 2005 @ 10:43am

    Re: What about Fishing Problems?

    it's that kind of wasted typing that is helping you make friends here, dorpus.

    Go back to /.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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