The point I've seen made about bike theft is that although the reward from a successful bike theft is small, the risk -- the probability of being caught times t

The point I've seen made about bike theft is that although the reward from a successful bike theft is small, the risk -- the probability of being caught times the likely consequence if one is caught -- is extremely small in most places. So the reward/risk calculation easily supports committing the theft. But if a municipality devotes even a small amount of resources -- an officer or two, full-time, I guess -- to prosecuting bike theft, that can raise the odds of getting caught for a single theft, I don't know, maybe three orders of magnitude -- from 10^-6 to 10^-3, let's say. Someone who steals hundreds of bikes a year is then looking at a real chance of getting caught for one of them. What I've seen argued, and I seem to recall there's even experimental evidence to support this, is that that's enough to reduce the reward/risk ratio to the point where bike theft as a career, at least, is uneconomic. You might still get occasional opportunistic thefts -- leaving a bike unlocked would still not be recommended -- but the bulk of the problem would go away. Coming back to the topic, the same principle probably applies here. You don't have to even try to solve all the ransomware crimes; you just have to solve enough of them, and come down hard enough on the perpetrators, to change the reward/risk calculation. That will probably be a lot harder to do, though, since they're unlikely to even be in the same country as the victims.