street prices for digital goods?

[dan at geer.org]

Damien Miller writes:
-+-------------------
 | 
 | > David Molnar <dmolnar at eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:
 | >
 | > >Dan Geer's comment about the street price of heroin as a metric for
 | > >success has me thinking - are people tracking the street prices of
 | > >digital underground goods over time?
 | >
 | > I've been (very informally) tracking it for awhile, and for generic
 | > data (non- Platinum credit cards, PPal accounts, and so on) it's
 | > essentially too cheap to meter, you often have to buy the stuff in
 | > blocks (10, 20, 50 at a time) to make it worth the sellers while.
 | 
 | At such cheap prices, it must be close to the point where it would
 | be worth it for the the card issuers to buy the numbers as a loss
 | mitigation measure.
 | 

I have had a guy who wished to remain nameless
claim that he makes a fine living breaking into
the machines of black-market card sellers and
copying the card numbers they have for sale.
He then (he says) takes those card numbers to
the issuing banks and sells those numbers to the
banks so that the banks can prophylactically
cancel the soon-to-be-affected cards.  He claimed
to get 50c/card.  All hearsay...

--dan

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