alt Hacker NewsThe need to defend against scams and abuse is a cost distributed across all of society - it’d be amazing if there were a way for all to share the costs without creating a giant firewall to wall off the bad countries.
How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.
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The problem is that law enforcement really just doesn't care about international crime.
On the victim's end, there's jurisdictional problems with prosecuting these crimes - you have to work with another country's law enforcement to bring them to justice. Which means a lot of additional bureaucratic hurdles to make sure you have a case that sticks.
And that's assuming the other country's law enforcement even wants to work with you. They have their own problems to deal with, after all. If scammers are targeting foreigners, why would you bother wasting resources protecting people who are not your citizens? It's not not a priority, but it's way lower priority than, say, catching a murderer or something.
Hell, the other country's cops might even be on the take. There's communities of amateur[1] scammer investigators and some of them have gotten so far as to infiltrate and compromise the scammers' operations. Sometimes, they'll even get enough evidence for a raid or an arrest... which almost always results in:
- The scammer being tipped off ahead of time about the raid, allowing them to destroy evidence
- The charges being dismissed after a laughably bad rebuttal by the arrested scammer[2]
Ultimately, scammers don't stay behind bars and continue running their scam.
This calculus works specifically because the crime is international. If, say, Indian tech support scammers were going after other Indians, the crime would be way easier to investigate, and law enforcement would have an incentive to crack down on both scammers and corrupt cops that let them escape justice.
[1] In the original meaning of "amateur" being "someone personally interested in the subject" rather than "someone unskilled at the task"
[2] Lawyers in the room might correctly point out the provenance problems with some of the evidence the scammer investigators obtain. This wouldn't be a problem if the police in these countries weren't telling scammers to destroy evidence ahead of time so the only thing to go off of is some hacked CCTV footage.
Get rid of financial inequality.
Let's start with actually punishing a scammer, ANY SCAMMER with the same gusto as the jackboot of copyright enforcement hits anyone in the world for daring to look an MCU movie the wrong way.
That's life I'm afraid - no system that rewards participation can be entirely free of people taking advantage of it somehow. It's an unavoidable cost that we pay to get the benefits. The best we can usually do is to incentivize good behaviour sufficiently that the percentage of bad actors is very low, using rewards and/or punishments as appropriate.