street prices for digital goods?

[Peter Gutmann]

Allen <netsecurity at sound-by-design.com> writes:

>I have a question about all this. There seems to be a disconnect between the
>approximate prices mentioned here - too cheap to only do small transactions,
>etc - and what I have seen when looking at various of the sites. Maybe I'm
>missing something and you could correct my thinking.

The difference is that you're paying for service with the higher-priced
vendors (and this is something new that's only really come in in the last
couple of years).  Cheap ones are just a dump of some looted merchant database
or whatever where you may or may not get the data after paying some fly-by-
night operator and when it arrives half the cards will be invalid.  The
premium-priced ones are established vendors charging for the level of service
they provide: You get a guaranteed-good card (typically with 48- or 72-hour
replacement guarantee), you can use escrow services to guarantee delivery of
goods, you may get a tech support hotline (assuming you speak Russian), and so
on (it varies from seller to seller, obviously).  But what you're paying for
isn't really the card but the level of service that comes with it.

Peter.

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