After seeing out how several warnings sent to a number of countries that have been the most productive in phishing attacks hit a brick wall, eBay burst and warned that there must be something more that can be done to stop fraudsters from targeting auction sites. Alongside Romania, which was nominated as having the biggest problem, were China and Russia, all three the source of the majority of the scams aimed at eBay users for personal and account details, silicon.com reported.

The charges brought against Romanian cybercriminals seem to be incredible, as Mark Lee, trust and safety manager for the UK branch of eBay, said that: "These attacks are definitely organized. There are towns in Romania where the entire focus is on sites like eBay as the main source of income." I for one find that difficult to believe, as I doubt that there is such a town, anywhere in the world, where all the 'revenue' is coming off of scams. Hacker towns, to name them more precisely, are something never seen before, but I'm open to any proof of that being the situation. At any rate, he said that phishing remains the main threat facing eBay users.

Because most of Romania's law enforcement efforts are concentrated on Bucharest, the rate of criminality has dropped there a little, especially after the three-year-old campaign that saw an end last June and led to several hundred arrests. However, most of the cases identified during that crackdown were coming from unnamed smaller towns, where backlogs of up to 200 eBay related fraud cases were found.

I find it particularly interesting that two former communist countries and one still under that regime have been proven to be the worst, and not in the politically discriminative way of the Cold War, but closer to a group mentality sort of meaning.