This is why I have a problem with a lot of the legal structure and incentives. If you measure in number of arrests you aren't solving the problems. I'm not sure there's any good metric to measure that.
To take an analogy I'll mention the drug war. The main target was always low level drug dealers and users. They're easy to arrest and easy to say you're doing something. But they are fairly inconsequential to the business of selling drugs and thus the availability on the streets. But it's orders of magnitude harder to go after the root of the problem. I don't want to detract this conversation with the other aspects or conspiracies (real or contrived), but just focus on the incentive structures. I think the same is here. Blizzard gets no short term reward for reporting fraudulent activity. It's hard to know if they get long term. But at the end of the day it would be the right thing to do.
That's what matters. Doing the right thing. Move fast and break things it's a great strategy. But it can't be used in isolation. If it is you're left with a trail of destruction which never gets cleaned up. It's hard to quantify objectives and so every objective function is misaligned. You need to rely on humans to see through that and correct the course as best they can. You need both the people pushing to move fast and the people pushing to slow down and repair. There's a harmony in that competition. Pick your camp but recognize that there's value in the other one too.
When it comes to the war on drugs there's a perverse incentive problem - said war provides endless amounts of easy to catch/prosecute crime which can be used to meet & exceed their performance targets without much effort. So there might not be too much incentive to kill this "cash cow" of low-level users/dealers by actually curtailing upstream supply.
This might not be too different from the payment anti-fraud industry (which is just varying degrees of snake oil). There are solutions that can be implemented such as actually strong two-factor authentication that could cut down on payment fraud dramatically but this would significantly reduce demand for this industry, so a lot of the field has a monetary incentive to keep the underlying primitives not so secure as to keep demand for their snake-oil.
I mean, the problem with the War on Drugs is that the drugs were only ever a symptom—while it's true that some small percentage of people would try, and get addicted to, drugs otherwise, the vast majority of addicts were people trying to fill a major hole in their lives. Treating addiction as a disease instead of a moral failing or a crime, legalizing drugs, and making sure that people who want to quit have resources available to do so, are all vastly more effective at reducing the illegal drug trade, as other countries have found.
In a similar way, a huge amount of this fraud would disappear if we took more known-to-be-effective measures to combat poverty (because many of these fraud techniques rely on hiring a whole bunch of desperate people to help keep it going): things like providing housing, single-payer health care, and universal basic income.
> I mean, the problem with the War on Drugs is that the drugs were only ever a symptom
No argument here, and it should be unsurprising I agree, since I'm arguing to not go after users. But also remember we can say the same about internet fraud. I'm all for addressing the roots of the problem. Big fan of ensuring there's a floor to living standards. But admittedly that's not the whole problem and fixing these things is incredibly complex. But I would say treating the addiction is a different side since that's downstream of production. Though complex because we do need to produce some drugs but we shouldn't need to spill blood to do so.
I find that a strange comparison. Certainly there are bigger fish to fry. In both drugs and credit cards there is a whole ecosystem. Cards probably more straight forward as these are typically being sold on websites and you thus have a clear marketplace. Which I'd differentiate a marketplace from a dealer on a corner. Go after the people who are the generators. That's people making the drugs or people stealing the cards in the first place. What do you mean there's no "big fish." If we're going to use a fish analogy it's not the size I care about, but the type.
I mean it's probably a guy who knows someone who can cook meth, rather than a servant of some kingpin who is running a massive drug conglomerate hiding who knows where.
And somewhere down the line means in a random kitchen for a while and then dismantled, not a huge lab buried somewhere. Nobody does more for the sake of selling drugs, unless they use drug money to fund their revolution, guerrila war, or whatever like that. Think more of lock stock and two smoking barrels, rather than breaking bad.
To take an analogy I'll mention the drug war. The main target was always low level drug dealers and users. They're easy to arrest and easy to say you're doing something. But they are fairly inconsequential to the business of selling drugs and thus the availability on the streets. But it's orders of magnitude harder to go after the root of the problem. I don't want to detract this conversation with the other aspects or conspiracies (real or contrived), but just focus on the incentive structures. I think the same is here. Blizzard gets no short term reward for reporting fraudulent activity. It's hard to know if they get long term. But at the end of the day it would be the right thing to do.
That's what matters. Doing the right thing. Move fast and break things it's a great strategy. But it can't be used in isolation. If it is you're left with a trail of destruction which never gets cleaned up. It's hard to quantify objectives and so every objective function is misaligned. You need to rely on humans to see through that and correct the course as best they can. You need both the people pushing to move fast and the people pushing to slow down and repair. There's a harmony in that competition. Pick your camp but recognize that there's value in the other one too.