When a scam comes together

What a beautiful little scam.

Pornoscams have been around for a while. First, an industry came up harvesting settlements from folks too embarrassed to have themselves named in suits for downloading the likes of "Nude Nuns with Big Guns." I'll claim a bit of prescience in having predicted this as a potential business model for porn in the age of Tube sites.

This one's as good. And, it displays some Kiwi ingenuity.

Porn site users are being conned by scammers using the New Zealand police logo.

New Zealand's finest are warning the users of adult websites the scam, which interrupts a users web session, has nothing to do with them.

The message featuring the police logo appears on their computer screen saying they have been fined for using the x-rated site and need to enter banking details and pay an instant fine.

Police have received a handful of calls about the scam from people believing the message is from them.

In at least one case a person's computer was frozen and they were advised it would remain frozen until they paid the fee into the account.

Police says they have no association with any of the websites and suggest users avoid accessing such sites. 

Calling Bruce Schneier...

Even more clever might be this twist on the scheme.

Some places make it illegal to host or view computer-generated pictures purporting to display minors; some places say fiction isn't a crime. So you can get arrested for looking at the Microsoft Paint pictures somebody drew of the Simpsons, depending on where you are. Get a server in a place where it isn't illegal to host fiction or CGI representations that are illegal to view in other regions. Watch the IP logs for people coming in from countries where viewing that content is illegal. Take their IP address and the browser stats that are basically a unique identifier, or close to it. Then put up the "We will contact the police in your country if you don't pay up" warning. People would know that the current Kiwi operation is a scam because looking at pornography isn't really illegal, and there's no way that the NZ Police would run this kind of instant-fine scheme. But the one I'm proposing... you could make pretty credible threats. Run the site for a few months without the extortion part so it can get a decent page rank for that kind of thing. Make sure there's no malware on the site or anything that might put off would-be targets. Then run the extortion scheme.

I am not advocating that anybody do this. It might be evil, depending on what you think about people who like to read stories about pedophilia, and whether you think reading fiction about pedophilia or looking at CGI pictures of same is a complement or a substitute for actual pedophilia. But it would be clever and it would work. I'm not even sure if it would be illegal to do it - it would have to depend on the jurisdiction from which you're hosting.

Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if nobody were already doing this. It looks like $20 on the sidewalk.

HT: Luis

Ignatieff on evil

Michael Ignatieff's essay on political evil reminds me of a great article by Lskvayan. Here's Ignatieff:

So, Wolfe’s first lesson is a very old one, but worth repeating. There is method in apparent madness. The world is not divided between a sane world of deliberative politics and an insane world of apocalyptic violence. It is all politics, all the way down. To call a terrorist attack “senseless” is merely to admit that you have not understood its purpose.

Lskvayan provided a nice rational choice story for Stalin's Great Terror. Stalin couldn't tell which of his workers were shirking and which were working. But instituting random draw exile to Siberian death camps with reduced probability of being sent to Siberia for turning in a shirker turns the workers into the monitors and helps solve the principal-agent problem that otherwise obtains. From Lskvayan's abstract:

There is no agreement about the reasons for Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–1939. This paper argues that the problem faced by Stalin was similar to the standard principal–agent problem: the country was run as one enormous firm with Stalin as the only residual claimant. The monetary incentive structure was inadequate and the threat of mass shirking by the agents was real. A simple model of a principal with two agents is developed to address the problem. Assuming that the agents can observe and can reveal each other's shirking, it is shown that, under some assumptions, an equilibrium exists with the following strategy profiles: unless someone's shirking is revealed, the principal is committed to randomly punishing one of the agents with positive probability; an individual agent never shirks and always reveals a co-worker's shirking. A case study of the period is used to check the plausibility of this hypothesis.

The very real output costs of exterminating a lot of workers in Siberia was a second-best solution to the very real output costs of Stalin's slaves' shirking. Other solutions aren't great either; it's the existence of such principal-agent problems and imperfections in Stalin's monitoring ability that provided the space within which small amounts of freedom could exist.

Meanwhile, some neuroscientists say evil doesn't exist.