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Konstantin posted:I don't know, it seems to be an easy way to transfer money for illegal activites, since it's anonymous, untraceable, and irreversible. The transaction costs are high, but less than traditional money laundering.
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Mar 26, 2016 19:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:My son tells me that a very popular method of laundering now is to buy Steam games at full price, then sell the codes at bargain prices. Bad money becomes good. They've tried to crack down on the practice quite a bit, but yeah, if you buy a steam code off the internet outside of Steam itself, you're probably supporting organized crime. Even the big secondary sellers have sometimes been caught getting codes from unverified sources.
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Mar 26, 2016 19:36
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Discendo Vox posted:They've tried to crack down on the practice quite a bit, but yeah, if you buy a steam code off the internet outside of Steam itself, you're probably supporting organized crime. Even the big secondary sellers have sometimes been caught getting codes from unverified sources.
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Mar 27, 2016 00:24
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I have a lot of trouble understanding that this is where your money is going, then still paying it anyways. Like, I get the idea of comfort in abstraction, but come on, your copy of Hunie Pop or whatever is literally funding ISIS.
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Mar 27, 2016 00:57
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Discendo Vox posted:I have a lot of trouble understanding that this is where your money is going, then still paying it anyways. Like, I get the idea of comfort in abstraction, but come on, your copy of Hunie Pop or whatever is literally funding ISIS. Or is literally going to someone who got an extra copy as a gift and doesn't have anything to do with it? 
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Mar 27, 2016 01:08
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It's also a great way to turn stolen credit card numbers into cash.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:15
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Discendo Vox posted:I have a lot of trouble understanding that this is where your money is going, then still paying it anyways. Like, I get the idea of comfort in abstraction, but come on, your copy of Hunie Pop or whatever is literally funding ISIS.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:21
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The company I work for now has a few huge spikes of attempted and later declined CC transactions a year, like millions of them in a couple days. Apparently they're money laundering attempts. It's kind of annoying since we have to deal with the weirdness in analysis / forecasting / user lifecycle modeling.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:22
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Konstantin posted:It's also a great way to turn stolen credit card numbers into cash. Is it? I thought they'd be caught fairly quick and the keys revoked.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:23
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Somebody walk me through this. Criminy McCriminal has an unusual amount of money for their job, and is investigated by the IRS. IRS asks "where did this money come from?" Criminy responds: "Uh.. I dunno." Then gets into further trouble. Alternately, Criminy buys a Steam code, then sells it for cash. Still has more money than accounted for, so IRS comes a-knocking. "Where did this money come from?" Criminy responds: "I got it by selling a steam code!" IRS asks: "where did you get that steam code?" Criminy responds: "Uh.. I dunno." Then gets into further trouble. Other than making the chat with the IRS longer, how is this helpful?
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Mar 27, 2016 01:27
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Marenghi posted:Is it? I thought they'd be caught fairly quick and the keys revoked. They get cycled through multiple users who are trying to profit from arbitrage in game prices, and across reseller organizations like G2A. Companies can mostly only stop individual batches of codes when they know that all of them were purchased fraudulently. Absurd Alhazred posted:Somebody walk me through this. The criminals are rarely in the US and their concern is cycling the account with which the money is associated. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has a "donation" in an account from one of his foreign backers. He knows that the US and other international law enforcement agencies can check activity and flow of money on accounts coming from the backer country. Alternately, Roman Seleznev has just finished purchasing account information for 50 credit cards. Both need to empty those accounts without directly transferring funds to their own main accounts. Both will use the money to purchase program keys and sell them to someone at a loss(the payment for this sale goes to a different account), who in turn sells them to G2A, which sells them to some final user further down the line. Everyone profits off of this except the original criminal, but their money is now clean-they may have purchased and sold codes multiple times to be extra sure. The same process is used with fake or stolen keys by criminals as a simple profit generator as well. The mix of functional and nonworking codes keep the system going. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 01:29
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Discendo Vox posted:I have a lot of trouble understanding that this is where your money is going, then still paying it anyways. Like, I get the idea of comfort in abstraction, but come on, your copy of Hunie Pop or whatever is literally funding ISIS. Eh. I already finance various African militias, child labour camps and dictators through purchasing various consumer goods that rely on resources and labour produced in the third world. Financing a few criminal organizations more or less by buying Steam codes on the grey market doesn't really register as an ethical issue at this point. (Not to mention all the American tax revenue I generate from my Netflix account, which goes straight to bombing weddings and performing coups to safeguard banana imports.)
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Mar 27, 2016 01:46
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Randler posted:Eh. I already finance various African militias, child labour camps and dictators through purchasing various consumer goods that rely on resources and labour produced in the third world. Financing a few criminal organizations more or less by buying Steam codes on the grey market doesn't really register as an ethical issue at this point. Yeah, it's this. You can't exist in the modern world without funding a lot of terrible things, and you're almost certainly sending more money to bad people just through your normal daily life than you are by buying a cheap Steam code every now and then. It sucks, but there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Saying "well, I know for sure that this Steam code came from some shady places so I won't buy it" is just a meaningless gesture.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:51
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Randler posted:Financing a few criminal organizations more or less by buying Steam codes on the grey market doesn't really register as an ethical issue at this point. More. Exclusively more.
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Mar 27, 2016 01:53
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If you're going to be knowingly financing criminal organizations by buying shady Steam keys, then just download poo poo off of piratebay and cut out the middleman for Christ's sake.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:26
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Mar 27, 2016 02:30
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Quit spendin' money on videogames.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:45
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duz posted:Section 230, unless you know something special about them. Just gaining a reputation as a provider of those services would kill it, or get it yanked from the app stores.
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Mar 27, 2016 03:41
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That's why the Mafia misses video rental. A store rents 500 movies a week? Report 600. Looks like some money just got cleaned. Oh and all 100 were a day late? You know how forgetful people are. Repeat.
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Mar 27, 2016 04:18
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I find it odd steam is such an easy source for cashing out stolen cc''s. Just for the fact I assumed most keys sold online were purchased legally from eastern Europe where games are cheaper, much like Aussie's buy games in western Europe because they cost so much at home. And also because steam seem so stringent on flagging suspicious purchases. Before I had a card I would borrow friends ones to make purchase and they always had to confirm the purchase due to getting flagged. And when I first got a card I was flagged, and since I been flagged during sales. More than any other store I use online steam seem to always get my purchase flagged as suspicious.
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Mar 27, 2016 04:25
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It's clear that organized crime will invest in my latest startup idea: àLaCartL, an app that automatically launders a stolen credit card with a touch of a finger.
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Mar 27, 2016 04:39
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Somebody walk me through this. I'd reckon it's not about tax evasion, but more being able to get the money into the legitimate financial system and across borders. I presume Steam gift cards can be purchased in cash in most every country, and games have more or less the same universal value. Say you wanted to get dirty cash out of Russia: Open a US Paypal/Ebay account, buy Steam cards in Rubles in Russia, buy games, sell code in USD with payment going to US paypal account. If you do it right, you can pretend to be at arms length from the person in the US which will minimize taxable gain and make claims on the income as proceeds of crime virtually impossible.
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Mar 27, 2016 05:01
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Marenghi posted:I find it odd steam is such an easy source for cashing out stolen cc''s. Just for the fact I assumed most keys sold online were purchased legally from eastern Europe where games are cheaper, much like Aussie's buy games in western Europe because they cost so much at home. They've been adding on those purchase confirmations, and delays on gifts, and a variety of other checks, over time as the problem has become worse and worse. Absurd Alhazred posted:It's clear that organized crime will invest in my latest startup idea: àLaCartL, an app that automatically launders a stolen credit card with a touch of a finger. Scramblr, a new app for randomly distributing equal amounts of funds among the accounts of all users. (some prcoessing delays may occur)
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Mar 27, 2016 05:03
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Isn't there a huge thread in SA MART that sells discount stream codes just like this?
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Mar 27, 2016 05:54
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Solkanar512 posted:Isn't there a huge thread in SA MART that sells discount stream codes just like this? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3390388
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Mar 27, 2016 06:22
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I thought Invictus just got his steam games from steambux from playing around in the marketplace for games like Dota2 or TF2. edit: confirmed - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3528291&pagenumber=18&perpage=40#post420939023
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Mar 27, 2016 06:23
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Cicero posted:I thought Invictus just got his steam games from steambux from playing around in the marketplace for games like Dota2 or TF2. Oh sure, that's what he claims, but has Lowtax checked to see if he's logging in from Raqqa? (or if he's Literally Ramzan Kadyrov)
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Mar 27, 2016 06:40
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Holy crap change the title of this thread because it's really good and I had no clue what the gently caress out was talking about until I randomly clicked the OP. Some perspective from the belly of the tiny microcosm beast. The biggest problem right now with tech startups isn't necessarily monetizing (although that doesn't help). A lot of the little unknown companies are busting out, and they're kind of serving as the canary in the cowl mine. There is a huge disconnect right now between the tech and the money, and it's generational. The investors are usually boomers or older. The workers are almost all 30 or younger and know what the tech can do bit suck at selling it. In addition, we're reaching market saturation (assuming we're not there already) as the generation that focused on tech begins to fill out the market that demanded it. The big push right now seems to be to contact work to clean up messes left by the offshore push, and eventually the companies that made that brilliant decision get hosed hard enough they have to either sell or shutter---which blows up contacting revenue and causes the smaller tech company to shutter as well. It's really terrifying to me as a tech worker. Yeah, Silicon Valley is the biggest, most visible example of this bullshit, but it's getting bad at a ground level. Eventually I'm gonna have issues finding a job. I've mitigated it by moving more and more into management and saving my coding for personal projects, but a lot of people are going to end up screwed if this goes as sideways as I think it will. tl;dr poo poo is likely to be hosed up very soon, please stop rooting for the tech sector to collapse because I like eating 
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Mar 27, 2016 18:33
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Also indicative of tech bust is that Swype can't autocorrect worth a poo poo
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Mar 27, 2016 18:36
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Chokes McGee posted:It's really terrifying to me as a tech worker. Yeah, Silicon Valley is the biggest, most visible example of this bullshit, but it's getting bad at a ground level. Eventually I'm gonna have issues finding a job. I've mitigated it by moving more and more into management and saving my coding for personal projects, but a lot of people are going to end up screwed if this goes as sideways as I think it will. This is purely anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but my experience is that there's very much an extreme shortage of programmers outside of major tech hubs. I do contract work and prefer being self-employed so I'm not in any way actively looking for a regular job, and I still get contacted by recruiters a few times per month. I've been brought in on interviews and been given offers by local companies even when I make it explicitly clear from the beginning that I'm not looking for a career change. All of this in spite of the fact that I maintain no real social media presence or online resume outside of what I provide to prospective clients. Part of why I got a little salty upthread (or maybe it is was in one of the other tech threads? these things are starting to blend together) with people talking about SV wage levels is that it feels to me like there's a huge divide in the tech industry when it comes to employment. Maybe everything really will go to hell when the tech bubble bursts and programmers start streaming out of the tech hubs in search of work, but for the moment I'm not too concerned.
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Mar 27, 2016 18:49
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Paradoxish posted:This is purely anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but my experience is that there's very much an extreme shortage of programmers outside of major tech hubs. This is very true, if you s/programmers/qualified, talented programmers/ I've been trying to build a data team and holy poo poo it's hard. The funnel looks like this: 1) maybe 50 (junior / early grad-ish) resumes a week show up, and say 10 people are sourced through referrals or LinkedIn 2) over half get screened out, so maybe 20 people get sent take-homes 3) maybe 3/4 send them back, and maybe 1/4 pass, so down to around 4 make it past the take-home 4) about half of them will make it through the initial phone screen 5) once they're on-site they have a good chance of getting an offer, except by now they're probably already talking to Google and Amazon too, and we have a bidding war The result is we end up making 1 or 2 offers a month, and often we end up losing the candidates anyway. If you're good though, the market is excellent for you right now. Just walk up to Amazon / Google / Netflix and collect your $250K+ base.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:06
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It's hard to make any kind of informed comment without knowing your specific needs, but I can't help but feel that your hiring process is too restrictive if you're seriously competing with Google, et. al. Like, if the expectation is that the only programmers who can/should get jobs are ones that can command six figure salaries right out of the gate then we really are in for an incredibly hard, incredibly painful correction in the tech labor market. Keep in mind that the median salary for developers in the US is somewhere south of $70k/year. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 19:21
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"The fall of unicorns: tech bust immanent"?Paradoxish posted:It's hard to make any kind of informed comment without knowing your specific needs, but I can't help but feel that your hiring process is too restrictive if you're seriously competing with Google, et. al. Like, if the expectation is that the only programmers who can/should get jobs are ones that can command six figure salaries right out of the gate then we really are in for an incredibly hard, incredibly painful correction in the tech labor market. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Mar 27, 2016 |
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Mar 27, 2016 19:31
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Seems pretty in line with the rest of the country's hiring practices post Big Recession. In that they're shooting for the high end worker that can easily jump ship to a more prestigious job, instead of considering bringing in someone that's not as stellar, but could be molded into a dependable employee within a year or three.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:31
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Paradoxish posted:your hiring process is too restrictive if you're seriously competing with Google, et. al. otoh, "we want to hire people who are not good enough to work at Google" can be a tough sell to the existing team. I have long joked that Google/FB/etc should sell the stream of rejected candidates, different prices for different stages that candidates make it to.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:41
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Subjunctive posted:otoh, "we want to hire people who are not good enough to work at Google" can be a tough sell to the existing team. I have long joked that Google/FB/etc should sell the stream of rejected candidates, different prices for different stages that candidates make it to. In the IDF, washing out from Pilot Training is the best way to get to some high-end AA/SF positions (aside from passing their test days directly). You should seriously suggest this as a way of extracting some additional value from your filtering process.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:45
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Paradoxish posted:Maybe everything really will go to hell when the tech bubble bursts and programmers start streaming out of the tech hubs in search of work, but for the moment I'm not too concerned.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:46
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Love the new title, Alhazred.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:48
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I agree with the comment about "not all companies need developers who can get hired at Google". I will say, however, that "developer" is pretty elastic, and can cover anything from Javascript front ends to firmware to big-iron (as we used to call it) cloud stuff. The average developer may well be working at the power company overseeing the legacy invoice-processing system. Yeah, I definitely agree, which is why I felt the need to qualify that post. Still, I don't think there's any reasonably wide definition of "developer" (especially at entry or junior levels) where you'd find a median national salary approaching $200k/year. The trendiest job title I could think of that still falls under the development umbrella is "data scientist," and Glassdoor is telling me that the nationwide average is around $113k/year. The point I was really driving at in my original post is that there are way, way more working developers out there than there are developers who would even make it past Google's screening process. The person overseeing that legacy invoice-processing system is still a developer, and jobs like that are where a lot of developers will (and should) end up working ultimately. There's nothing wrong with that.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:55
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The thread isn't really concerned with enterprise CRUD developers though. It's like complaining about how retail bank branch staff are being unfairly maligned in a thread mocking finance excesses.
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Mar 27, 2016 19:58
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