>I think it's because you're flaunting yourself, you're daring them to do something, and they hate that even more.
Exactly. Everytime DPR gives an interview, it kicks the DEA in the balls and announces to the entire US through the media how inept they are. With this interview they can now go and get greenlighted double the resources to go after him. A guy here who was shipping seeds to the US was the only vendor caught out of dozens of storefonts doing the same thing because he was the only politically active one by funding NORML and other US legalization movements. They singled him out as the target to go after and even mentioned this in their press release after they caught him.
DEA go after low hanging fruit to get more press/funding, and whoever is making them look bad or is political. If you just stay in your quiet corner of the darknet and sell drugs they are more apt to leave you alone for the guy talking to Forbes beacuse there's only so much resources to go around. There's another market, BMR that you never hear much about because he's smart enough not to give interviews even though the site has been talked about in mainstream media articles as well. He learned his lesson saying too much when he closed down his clearnet site and let it slip he was starting BMR. Considering he's still operating without being arrested kind of obvious where the resources are going to (making an example of DPR, if they ever catch him).
Even worse he's calling out his competition which is a big mistake. It's like this guy has zero knowledge of the carding world and all the market vs market attacks that have gone on since the late 1990s. They sold drugs on those sites too
People who steal credit cards (usually in industrial quantities, often mag stripe data), then use those credit cards fraudulently. You get credit cards by retail theft (corrupt waitstaff, etc.), site breakins (particularly before PCI and vaulting, when every crappy ecommerce site had a bunch of card data lying around), compromises at network participants like acquirers, corrupt staff, etc.
There are whole communities of people in this space -- it tends to be fairly large and organized groups, since the actual monetization side involves printing a bunch of plastic cards and distributing them to people to make purchases (at retail).
It's related to the ATM skimming/theft/etc. world, and overlaps a lot with "traditional organized crime". Lots of Eastern European presence, too.
Carding sites and forums exist to make a market in credit cards, exploits to get more credit cards, tools to monetize them, etc.
That sounds like a lot of effort and genuine technical skill to invest in crime. If that is true, you have to wonder what motivates people to do it. Is it really profitable enough to be rationally worth the risk if you don't care about the ethics involved, or is it that the people who do it can't find legitimate employment where they live due to the state of the local economy or have personal traits that prevent them from being employed?
1) It's incredibly profitable for some of the participants
2) Until maybe 2007, there were not a whole lot of comparably-profitable licit opportunities for Eastern Europeans. The contract marketplaces have helped. We really need to fix our immigration system in the US (and, worldwide, really) to help more.
3) A lot of the more dangerous parts are essentially blue collar crime; this is FAR safer than drugs/prostitution/human trafficking/terrorism/armed robbery/etc., so it's a clear decision for those guys.
Exactly. Everytime DPR gives an interview, it kicks the DEA in the balls and announces to the entire US through the media how inept they are. With this interview they can now go and get greenlighted double the resources to go after him. A guy here who was shipping seeds to the US was the only vendor caught out of dozens of storefonts doing the same thing because he was the only politically active one by funding NORML and other US legalization movements. They singled him out as the target to go after and even mentioned this in their press release after they caught him.
DEA go after low hanging fruit to get more press/funding, and whoever is making them look bad or is political. If you just stay in your quiet corner of the darknet and sell drugs they are more apt to leave you alone for the guy talking to Forbes beacuse there's only so much resources to go around. There's another market, BMR that you never hear much about because he's smart enough not to give interviews even though the site has been talked about in mainstream media articles as well. He learned his lesson saying too much when he closed down his clearnet site and let it slip he was starting BMR. Considering he's still operating without being arrested kind of obvious where the resources are going to (making an example of DPR, if they ever catch him).
Even worse he's calling out his competition which is a big mistake. It's like this guy has zero knowledge of the carding world and all the market vs market attacks that have gone on since the late 1990s. They sold drugs on those sites too