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Wouldn't it be easier to simply pay someone to hack you and then tell the public, "We were hacked and all of our funds were stolen"? What prevents someone from

by gzer0 4y ago

Wouldn't it be easier to simply pay someone to hack you and then tell the public, "We were hacked and all of our funds were stolen"? What prevents someone from doing this? It allows for perfect plausible deniability, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> What prevents someone from doing this? Paranoia probably. Is there anybody you could trust to do something that illegal with that much money, that wouldn't ghost you after they had it? Maybe close family or friends, but the closer they are to you, the easier the plot is for investigators to unravel.
- senectus1 4y ago
  Asking the wrong question, because "prevention" or prohibition never works. We should be asking what drives people. if we can shift the drive from accumulating wealth to accomplishing great things...
perardi 4y ago
…um, that’s a funny definition of “perfect” when you have a hacker with a Signal message history that they can use to blackmail you to hell and back.
aqme28 4y ago
Why pay an anonymous hacker when you yourself can just be that anonymous hacker?
csense 4y ago
How could this possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways: - You pay the hacker to hack you, the hacker takes the payment and disappears. - The hacker hacks you, steals all the money for themselves and disappears. - The hacker turns you in and collects a reward from the government, because the hacker has a moral conscience | is actually a Fed | decides getting a small amount of reward money legitimately from the government or potential victims has a better risk/reward tradeoff than conspiring with a stranger to steal a huge amount of money. - The hacker hacks you, but keeps records of messages showing your complicity and blackmails you with them. Basically it boils down to: - No honor among thieves (you can't just trust the hacker to keep his word if he has a lot of incentives to break it) - The courts won't help (generally if you say in court "I paid this guy to commit a crime and he took the money but didn't commit the crime," not only will the court refuse to enforce the contract and order the hacker to pay you, but you've now confessed -- under oath, no less! -- to being involved in a crime, which makes it quite likely you'll be arrested on the spot and prosecuted for your actions) - Physical violence doesn't work well on the Internet. (Traditional organized crime enforces its "contracts" by threatening or carrying out physical violence against contract breakers or their family. This would only work if you knew your hacker's real name and location, and presumably the sort of people who sell illegal hacking services to anonymous strangers are quite, um, shy about giving their clients any information about their identity or location, for exactly the reason they don't want a crazed client to show up and physically attack them.)

by gzer0 4y ago

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> What prevents someone from doing this? Paranoia probably. Is there anybody you could trust to do something that illegal with that much money, that wouldn't ghost you after they had it? Maybe close family or friends, but the closer they are to you, the easier the plot is for investigators to unravel.

senectus1 4y ago
Asking the wrong question, because "prevention" or prohibition never works. We should be asking what drives people. if we can shift the drive from accumulating wealth to accomplishing great things...

perardi 4y ago

…um, that’s a funny definition of “perfect” when you have a hacker with a Signal message history that they can use to blackmail you to hell and back.

aqme28 4y ago

Why pay an anonymous hacker when you yourself can just be that anonymous hacker?

csense 4y ago

How could this possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways: - You pay the hacker to hack you, the hacker takes the payment and disappears. - The hacker hacks you, steals all the money for themselves and disappears. - The hacker turns you in and collects a reward from the government, because the hacker has a moral conscience | is actually a Fed | decides getting a small amount of reward money legitimately from the government or potential victims has a better risk/reward tradeoff than conspiring with a stranger to steal a huge amount of money. - The hacker hacks you, but keeps records of messages showing your complicity and blackmails you with them. Basically it boils down to: - No honor among thieves (you can't just trust the hacker to keep his word if he has a lot of incentives to break it) - The courts won't help (generally if you say in court "I paid this guy to commit a crime and he took the money but didn't commit the crime," not only will the court refuse to enforce the contract and order the hacker to pay you, but you've now confessed -- under oath, no less! -- to being involved in a crime, which makes it quite likely you'll be arrested on the spot and prosecuted for your actions) - Physical violence doesn't work well on the Internet. (Traditional organized crime enforces its "contracts" by threatening or carrying out physical violence against contract breakers or their family. This would only work if you knew your hacker's real name and location, and presumably the sort of people who sell illegal hacking services to anonymous strangers are quite, um, shy about giving their clients any information about their identity or location, for exactly the reason they don't want a crazed client to show up and physically attack them.)