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Story: VeriSign warns of organised gangs behind Net crime

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Until when will this misinformation spread?

Funny… This article is such a fine example of a mind virus, a rapidly spreading belief, and a false one at that. It spreads in such a way that people accept the info for granted without questioning it and spread it as if it were a scientific truth. It's not a white lie or even a harmless lie. It’s a harmful and destructive untruth in which the webmasters and online vendors are at loss and someone is stealing their profits (more on this later, bare with the story). Interesting, no? Especially since its coming from the advice of a company that is supposed to be working in their interest. How did it all begin though?

Well... There once were a group of teenagers living in a small little country. They found out about this new thing called "the internet". At first it was just fun and entertainment. But they pretty soon discovered there is much more that this “internet” thing offers. By some accident they found about this thing called "carding". They discovered they could get for free all the things they wished for as a present. It seemed almost miraculous. They spread this information to all their friends and they all got the joy out of it. It was wrong, very wrong, but they did not care. Their fun was of course short-lived. Apparently the only reason they could do that was because this "internet" thing was still in its infancy and there were many glitches in its security. But the glitches got handled and they could no longer get free "presents".

So what happened? The websites which had the security glitch fixed it and all was well. But someone had to take the blame, and it was decided that since a large percentage of the orders from a few small countries were fraudulent - " Hey terrorism fear is in vogue, why don't we call these countries internet terrorists and blame it on them?". So they published the percentages, leaving out on purpose the absolute numbers of orders (a few dozen orders in total). Somebody’s been reading "How to lie with statistics" by Darrell Huff.
So why was the percentage of fraudulent orders high, and the absolute number of fraudulent orders insignificant? Because in these countries the internet was just brought in (this was 5 years ago). And of course, as with any new technology, its always the hackers and geeks who get on first, not the housewives, retired folks, students, cheerleaders etc... The total internet population was small (a few hundred people) and consisted of mostly technological geeks. So of course what happened is these countries got listed on the blacklists and it became the internet "thumb of rule" not to sell to these countries. Everybody knew the “rule” saying not to sell to these countries, yet nobody knew exactly why, they just knew "hey everybody is doing it". The story doesn't stop there however. Eventually the internet in these countries boomed just like everywhere in the world. Everyone wanted to "get online" whether it was a girl looking for cosmetics advice, or a housewive looking for cooking supplies. Pretty soon the internet population went in to the hundreds of thousands. So now the internet population had of course come to be composed of the same percentage of legit users (99.999%) as anywhere else in the world. The untruth however stayed, the 5 year old percentage stuck as some sort of a dogmatic rule. So when the little teen girl went on to order her favourite Brad Pitt movie she learned that "we can't ship to you coz you're probably a no good stinking hacker, so bugger off".

So who's stealing your profits? Well... That's the most interesting point. You see... Those same companies that started the untruth as a part of their blame-game... They are shipping orders to these same “terrorist” countries like mad. Their response to the teen girl is "oh yes of course we'll ship your favourite movie order, we love your country! Right now! Thanks for doing business with us!". Interesting? - Yes. Hypocritical - YES!

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