Honor Among Thieves?

Honor among thieves is a fundamental necessity in the cybercrime underground. After all, for crime to succeed in today’s highly specialized fraud supply chain, fraudsters must work together. They must trust each other.

But hey, at the end of the day, we talk about crooks.

So the report from Security Hack about hackers stealing Phished credentials from honest, hardworking Phishers should not come as total surprise. Watch the short video: it’s a classic.

This reminds me of another case of unscrupulous skullduggery:

A while ago one of the fraudsters in a notorious Russian fraud forum complained about another criminal trying to blackmail him with an archetypal “protection” offering. Here’s an excerpt of the blackmail text:

Hello!

Your service is very good… But I wonder how the forum members will react when your service will be in the backlist?

There are plenty of resources to do this: Fake screenshots, chat logs, and negative feedback of my clone users. Here are my terms: You pay me 80 Web Money Dollars (=$80) and I will bury your most ferocious competitors. If you decline, I will begin to spam your thread with negative feedback, spam your ICQ, waste your time by ordering goods and then cancelling. I have plenty of resources for that: 15 nicknames planted in all the forums, all with good reputation. This can bring your service to the ground.

Think what is more important to you: the lack of competition and relaxed work, or those 80 WMZ. I think the choice is obvious!

3 days of silence will be interpreted as a “no”. Don’t even think about telling this to anyone, as I am a man of my principals.

What a crook. I really like the ending:

“Don’t even think about telling this to anyone, as I am a man of my principles”.

Got to love the guy…