[hnbad]

It's literally the WW2 airplane hit patterns image. Criminals who get caught are the ones making the kinds of mistakes that make it easier to catch them.

Organized crime also does a lot of "dumb" stuff but they do it at scale and make it harder to trace back the individual incident to the organization's core. They also heavily rely on disposable accomplices, which is why you still see these "make money doing nothing from home, just let us use your bank account" scams.

[groestl]

Exactly. Also, opsec does not need to be bulletproof if your operation is goverment sponsored or at least government tolerated. There's whole companies, doing downright illegal stuff in the open, enjoying sweetheart treatment by officials. OTOH, a Russian hacker, for example, would know better than to steal from their own countrymen. So they operate in other jurisdictions.

You would be mistaken btw to think this only applies to non-western parts of the world. The spectrum is a wide one, from completely covert operations, over organized crime, to companies and even the government itself. The ones who are caught are usually not the smart ones. Of course, the Dunning Kruger effect is also strong here, so most of them think they're too smart to be caught.