[ambiate]

I remember back in ~2000~2001 there was some popular cart application floating around. Everyone used it! A google search of "/uri/somecart.cgi?something" brought up tons of pages... and of course, a vulnerability in the wild put everyone's information out on a silver plate for these card scavengers.

Well, luckily I was poor and 16 when they bounced and locked my card up right away(never buying from that tshirt store again).

Years down the line though, I still can find my name, old cc, and address on these lists. They're all over IRC...

On the topic of scamming, most of them use a reputation based system (ie. traderx has 60 successful transactions, while traderb has -3 successful transactions; who would you go with?)

You can also hire moderators to check out some things, iirc. Such as, placing a $0.03 charge through a merchant and verifying or checking the accounts.

I did a pretty large study of this back in 2003 or so, but really lost interest once I pissed off the wrong people and they got personal.

[jrp]

Would you be interested in elaborating on that last sentence?

[ambiate]

Basically a man, "Pablo," figured out what I was doing in his community because I was being too blunt. Pablo told me to find somewhere else to toy around. After about another month of my presence, Pablo somehow got my phone number and called me. He had a strong Romanian accent and quite the vicious set of vocal cords to accompany his voice.

I'll never forget it, he not only told me my mother's name, but also read off her social security number and told me it was 'disgusting pig' she was on welfare. (born with CP)

That shock (the shock of involvement of family) led me to ditching all my research and moving on to writing papers on Cisco routers.

That was back in 2001, finding identities and ssn's wasn't quite so easy; especially for an invalid mother who had never ventured near a keyboard. On reflection, I suppose it wasn't too hard even then to obtain info if you had money, but still creepy to have some international guy threaten your life/your mother's life for gathering info.

This actually happened again recently, but the shock wasn't quite there. This time, my girlfriend was attacked by an angry blackhat SEO because I was treading on his niche territory. Its not too hard to tie adwords campaigns > domains > domain whois > real name > facebook/social networking > family and get info on them these days. This guy contacted me first too, but moved on to harassing my girlfriend. Domain parking, go go. Its not worth the $15 a month to get harassed. I'm pretty sure he got my adsense account banned (suspicious clicks) + had something going on to click my ads automatically and waste my money (I had a 15% CTR at one point). Also my wordpress had someone logged into my admin at one point, but I've basically turned my linode into knox since then.

She didn't quite seem to understand why I was in a panic over the situation...

[vixen99]

"Romanian accent"? This suggests to me that either you yourself are Romanian or you have a rather acute ear. I live in Romania and it seems to me that almost every Romanian speaks English with a slightly different accent. I'd be hard put to it to identify a Romanian from his accent if I lived in London for instance. The same would not be true of an Italian, French or German native. I have no idea what a 'Romanian accent' is, let alone a 'strong one'.