The problem with internet fraud is that no one is really trying to make the fraudsters accountable for their actions, instead what they’re doing is essentially “shoo’ing them away”, and fraudsters after being shoo’ed away simply try again until they, almost invariably, eventually do succeed.

Subsequently, the industry of fraud is generally lucrative and is thus constantly growing.

When I worked at Blizzard, there were many mechanisms in place to spot fraudulent credit card transactions and cancel them before they actually billed the card holder, but there was no process for reporting the fraudsters to prevent them doing the same thing again tomorrow.

This is probably the same strategy that every company does, because there is no practical action any company can do to try make fraudsters accountable and thus discourage them from simply trying again.

So the problem of fraud is getting ever bigger and increasingly unmanageable and out of control.

The problem is a non-trivial political one, governments need to create task forces to work to reduce the size of the fraud industry, perhaps by catching fraudsters and making them accountable.

The problem is even harder than simple political will though, because it’s cross jurisdictional, meaning governments of different countries all need to work together on this.

This may seem impossible at the moment, but I believe until it is achieved fraud is only going to get increasingly worse.