I haven't been blogging much, because for the most part there isn't much that is new to say. I generally blog for my own reasons, like getting complex thoughts into a cohesive written form, as a discipline in reducing the crud.
But sometimes the yearning comes back. Here's a funny one about iTunes:
Gang arrested for buying own music online with stolen cards UK police have arrested nine people accused of using stolen credit cards to buy music they made themselves from iTunes and Amazon, fraudulently netting around $300,000 in royalties.The gang is accused of creating several songs before using an online US company to upload them to Amazon and iTunes for sale.
Between September 2008 and January 2009 the group allegedly used around 1500 stolen or cloned British and American credit cards to buy $750,000 worth of songs.
Apple and Amazon, who at the time were unaware of the plot against them, paid royalties totalling $300,000 out on the sales.
OK, that's funny. On first blush it looks like a good way to launder the funds from stolen credit cards. The problem of course is that it leads back to the perpetrators, in a very strange and "sore thumb" way.
When all these stolen credit cards start showing a high iTunes pattern, the logic is pretty easy to follow. Does a crook need to buy a song on iTunes? No, a crook has easier ways like cracking it or downloading it from any of a dozen open sites. So they don't want the song ... so follow the money. Which is easy to do with a bit of datamining software.
With slightly more thought, then, this reveals a rather stupid bunch of crooks. What do we do when we catch a rather stupid bunch of crooks? Not much, because they will eliminate themselves one day or other from something else. Therefore this is nothing more than a funny story.
Posted by iang at June 11, 2009 10:15 AM | TrackBack