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Pakistani firm shipped fentanyl analogs, scams to us
- betterThanTexas 2y ago[flagged]
- mmazing 2y agoWhy does everything need to be tied to revenue? Genuine question.
- betterThanTexas 2y ago[flagged]
- tw04 2y agoSo what are your incentives? You made a brand new account just to anonymously question Krebs.
- betterThanTexas 2y ago[flagged]
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- saagarjha 2y ago[flagged]
- baby_souffle 2y agoBecause the number of times $ arbitrary_event happens and money is a top contributing factor has got to be at least a trillion to one. Or said differently: safe to assume money had something to do with it, whatever it is.
- tw04 2y agoFortunately if you click on the website, you can deduce the funding model in about 30 seconds: https://krebsonsecurity.com/cpm/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/cpm/ But I'd imagine you don't ACTUALLY care about the funding source of Krebs, you're just hoping to distract from the topic at hand.
- betterThanTexas 2y ago[flagged]
- dgfitz 2y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2y ago> You sure seem like nothing more than a troll with an agenda. Keep digging. Please don't make accusations like this against other HN users, no matter how right you are or you feel you are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- flutas 2y agoFWIW, that link 403s for me. https://i.imgur.com/T3RUBiz.png https://i.imgur.com/T3RUBiz.png
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dgfitz 2y agoHere, I looked it up for you: Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity expert behind Krebs on Security, primarily generates revenue through banner advertisements displayed on his website. His website, which receives over a million visits per month, attracts this income. While he also receives information from law enforcement and other sources, his primary income stream is advertising, according to a WSJ article.
- betterThanTexas 2y ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2y agoPlease don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jfengel 2y agoWhy bother selling actual fentanyl when you've got a thriving business selling fake homework help? Seems like a lot less overhead to manage.
- SchemaLoad 2y agoSurely LLMs put the homework help industry out of business.
- michaelbuckbee 2y agoNot joking, there's actually a lawsuit from one of the homework aid sites against Google as the AI Overviews are providing the answers that were previously been teased and upsold on their site. Left unsaid in the filing was that it seemed like _most_ of the pages on the homework site were in fact scanned from copy written textbooks and then solved and they were trying to SEO rank for _exactly_ the question in the homework.
- awesome_dude 2y agoBest "they're stealing our homework answers" lawsuit ever :)
- whaleofatw2022 2y agoProbably something about margin vs volume. One complicated transaction that could net a huge profit vs lots of smaller transactions that result in less overall profit despite same cost. He'll ive seen legit businesses get burned on the same mindset. More than once. It's just in the legal transaction space, the risk shifts more towards 'delivering a crappy product' than, say, 'your employees get arrested' when you are forced to hit a deliverable.
- golergka 2y agoBecause for some it’s less important to earn money and more important to destabilise your geopolitical rival.
- walterbell 2y agoTurtles all the way down. > the company’s most lucrative scam business: Hundreds of sites peddling fake college degrees and diplomas. People who purchased fake certifications were subsequently blackmailed by Axact employees posing as government officials.. “Axact took money from at least 215,000 people in 197 countries — one-third of them from the United States.. earning the company at least $89 million”.. a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ‘not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact
- adynaton 2y ago>Axact That name sounds familiar Darknet Diaries: 142: Axact Episode webpage: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/142 https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/142 Media file: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/dovetail.prxu.org/7057/89224489-cbda-4a04-ad19-013ba38ccd01/722ffbdf-4406-41f2-93a0-a90717eef990.mp3 https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/dovetail.prxu.org/7...
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago> FAZAL: Yeah, I thought the same; kind of creepy. But it’s far worse than that. I was talking with someone from another team and they said, go to facebook.com and try to log in with this e-mail and password. We were able to log in to these people’s Facebook accounts. This is why MFA needs to be a requirement everywhere
- dzhiurgis 2y agoKinda ironic that social media sites do it better than your bank. My airline even has passkeys!
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoAs a minimal social media user, do any social media sites actually require MFA these days? You can have the best security features in the world but if they are opt in and even a slight degradation of UX the vast majority of people will not adopt them. Security often needs to be beaten over the head of the populace to be successful. Let’s Encrypt and HTTPS in the browser is a good example of this.
- bryan0 2y agoThis part was also amusing: > KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Google Ad Transparency links for nearly 500 different websites tied to this network of ghostwriting, logo, app and web development businesses. Those website names were then fed into spyfu.com, a competitive intelligence company that tracks the reach and performance of advertising keywords. Spyfu estimates that between April 2023 and April 2025, those websites spent more than $10 million on Google ads.
- morkalork 2y agoThe one selling pick axes always wins
- Havoc 2y ago[flagged]
- throwaway48476 2y agoCross border/jurisdictional payments need to be insured and reversible. This will stop the scams.
- foxglacier 2y agoReversible by who? Not the payer or it'll create fraud in the other direction similar to credit card chargeback fraud or Ebay's "I didn't receive my item, give me my money back" fraud.
- throwaway48476 2y agoBy the insurer. Credit card issuers are already privatized legal dispute courts.
- TZubiri 2y agoI'm pretty sure institutional wires are reversible. Courts can also freeze accounts, the only weakpoint is absconding and quit scamming, but you lose the reputation of a whole bank in that.
- throwaway48476 2y agoCourts can freeze accounts within their jurisdiction. If a US scammer steals money the courts can reverse it. If an asian scammer does it there's no recourse, that's why it must be insured.
- spwa4 2y ago... and the Pakistani court sided with the scammers, after the judge was paid about $40000. So relying on the justice system doesn't help anyone here (and that's assuming you're willing to pay enough to run a court case on the other side of the world in the first place).
- TZubiri 2y agoof course. But the court can freeze: A- All accounts of the foreign company within their jurisdiction. i.e: foreign company can no longer do business with the state B- Freeze accounts of foreign bank, or order them to cover the remedy, C- Embargo country.
- TZubiri 2y agohttps://youtu.be/_uMEE7eaaUA?si=nar1NcXX1YHb4X5G https://youtu.be/_uMEE7eaaUA?si=nar1NcXX1YHb4X5G An interesting time to publish this, but no doubt Krebs was working on it before the India attack. When I saw Krebs getting into international warfare politics, I thought he was out of his element, but doubtless he is pulling some relevant strings from the cyber aspect. I'd be interested in seeing if he can get in on something close to the actual war like the NSO whatsapp exploits. So far Krebs has brought a lot of attention to scammers. But at any point he might make the jump and link cyber to actual attacks on life.
- boredalch 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- boredalchemist 2y ago[flagged]
- alvah 2y agothat's about the lamest sockpuppetry I've ever seen, against stiff competition.
- suraci 2y ago[flagged]
- beefnugs 2y ago[flagged]