Running a real business requires actual hard work and determination... not just brains. Sometimes the technical brains don't even matter that much because you c

Running a real business requires actual hard work and determination... not just brains. Sometimes the technical brains don't even matter that much because you can hire them. Also, in most parts of the world entrepreneurship is a much harder "career" to pick and there are more bureaucratic hurdles and social friction. Keeping your lazy ass parked on a sofa while you steal some info that happens to be cc numbers and then sell them is much easier... > Also, the most impressive part was that the two hackers were able to actually get to the US :-) No, it's not. Travel visas are easy to get in US-friendly countries (Romania is much more US-friendly or "eager to kiss US ass" than most other European countries). Also, if you read on... "He took the traditional route with Oprea. The U.S. government sought the Romanian’s extradition. It worked". They could've done the same for the rest, the Romanian gov would have just handed them on a silver plate. Also, if they had been trialed in their country they would have most likely gotten similar sentences - $40k is not enough to safely bribe your way through the justice system and the prosecutors would have been either fair or most likely quite harsh on them. Maybe they were unsure they got all the evidence to effectively prosecute them in the US or most likely they just needed the elaborate phishing operation to make themselves look cool and get more funding for their department in the future, hence the excessive media coverage too, wasting tax payers money while jerking off with this role-play... It's incredibly easy to catch stupid hackers in pro-US states, what they did could probably have been done by a smarter-than-average sysadmin helping a regular us police detective at 1% of the cost of all this "elaborate operation"... EDIT+: My point is that the ss guys just picked themselves a few very low hanging fruits, got themselves excessive media coverage for it and spent way too much time and money on this.