14 DAY TRIAL // You've heard the news, cyber-crime is worth more than drug dealing, but who knew that spam-scam netted, this year only, more than $2.1 billion. These numbers have been pointed out by Reuters that also informs the 2 billions are just in fake checks and arrests, so, who knows how much money is made through this method? The Police aren't as good at catching cyber-criminals as they are at catching the normal ones, not yet, at least.
Also, as other reports show, false positives regarding scams and fraud make real crime go unpunished, as the Police can't possibly attend to every report of suspicious financial activity. This is why, in my opinion, spam-scams have got to worth more than "just" two billion dollars.
To be honest with you, I have no idea how some people manage to get scammed on the web. And by that I don't mean that I don't know what methods scammers use, but that I can't believe people are so gullible. No matter what the papers publish, what journalists say on TV or what the Police warns us against, these people are not paying attention to any of it - that's why they get scammed.
To get scammed you need to have quite a large amount of cash. Let me give you an example - should a spam-scam message get to a Romanian, asking for $5.000 and promising that he will get back $5.500 (as most spam-scam routines have it) this would never work. Why? Because the average salary is something around $400, which means no one would take such risks. And you know what this also means? It means that if they (the scammers) want to be successful, they have to target people in rich countries. So that's what I don't understand here - how can some people be so economically developed and have authorities warning them about these scams and still fall for them? It just doesn't make sense!