In the short documentary "In Search of the Most Dangerous Town on the Internet", filmmaker Sean Dunne in collaboration with Norton by Symantec, travels to Romanian town Râmnicu Vâlcea, to meet with some notorious hackers. Within various groups of people, this little town is also nicknamed Hackerville, because of its high activity of Internet frauds. Following text is taken from Wired's article "Welcome to Hackerville: The Romanian cybercriminal hotspot":
Among law-enforcement officials around the world, the city of 120,000 has a nickname: Hackerville. It's something of a misnomer; the town is indeed full of online crooks, but only a small percentage of them are actual hackers. Most specialise in ecommerce scams and malware attacks on businesses. According to authorities, these schemes have brought tens of millions in Romanian leu into the area over the past decade, fuelling the development of new apartment buildings, nightclubs and shopping centres. Râmnicu Vâlcea is a town whose business is cybercrime, and business is booming.
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In the early days, the perpetrators weren't exactly geniuses. One of the first cases out of the region involved a team based in the neighbouring town of Piteşti. One crook would post ads for mobile phones; the other picked up the wired money for orders that would never ship. The two men had made a few hundred dollars from victims in the US, and the guy receiving the cash hadn't even bothered to use a fake ID. "I found him sitting in an internet café," says Costel Ion, a Piteşti police officer who had been working the cybercrime beat. "He just confessed."
But the scammers innovated and adapted. One early advance was establishing fake escrow services: victims would be asked to send payments to these supposedly trustworthy third parties, which had websites that made them look like legitimate companies. The scams got better over the years, too. To explain unbelievably low prices for used cars, for example, a crook would pose as a US soldier stationed abroad, with a vehicle in storage back home that he had to sell. (That tale also established a plausible US contact to receive the money.) In the early years, the thieves would simply ask for advance payment for the nonexistent vehicle. As word of the scam spread, the sellers began offering to send the cars for inspection -- asking for no payment except "shipping".
But Dunne's short film isn't just about fraud and malicious activity. For example, we meet hacker Guccifer, now in high-security prison, who acted out of curiosity and wanting to uncover truths, and hacker Iceman, who works for hire for whoever pays. Dunne's material would suit great for a full length documentary, so it can dig deeper into the socio-economics aspects. I started to watch the film, mistakenly assuming the story would revolve around online scams, but came out of it much wiser, beginning to question our social and economic systems.
See the full documentary:
H/t Devour.
