[ILUG] "Virus" scanning on Linux

[Justin Mason]

Timothy Murphy writes:
> On Thursday 12 June 2008 02:37:17 pm jm at jmason.org wrote:
> > bear in mind that 10% of web users in the UK have been scammed,
> > losing an average of UKP875 per person:
> > Â 
> > http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/03/26/uk-e-fraud-victims-l
> >ose-875-each-on-average
> 
> I was interested in this, and did a tiny bit of "research" on it.
> The report itself does not appear to be on-line,
> but there is a Press Release about it at
> <http://www.getsafeonline.org/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=1449>
> which makes the claims Justin mentions above,
> although closer study suggests that only about 40% of the loss
> could be described as due to scamming.
> 
> I'm fairly dubious about the figures,
> which are far more than I would gather from casual conversation.
> 
> Somewhere else I read that the average on-line expenditure
> by those who indulge in this habit was around 1,000 pounds per year.
> So this would suggest that the 10% (actually the figure quoted is 12%)
> seem to have lost almost their entire expenditure.
> 
> I would guess that the "average" of 875 pounds loss
> was largely due to a small number of very large losses,
> probably by large companies.

Probably largely correct.  in my opinion it seems most likely that a small
number had very large losses, and a larger number had tiny losses --
probably the odd "dodgy" eBay sale like yourself -- which smooths out
those figures.  I doubt companies are involved, though, as the survey
seemed to deal entirely with individuals.  Possibly some of those
individuals also spend a lot more than UKP1000 per year online.

Maybe one of them was on the scale of UC Irvine's Dr Louis Gottschalk:
http://419.bittenus.com/links/gottschalk.htm

> It seems surprisingly difficult to find precise figures,
> although eg banks must know exactly how much credit card fraud there is.

Banks don't tend to make much noise about their own insecurities...

> The figures I have seen vary wildly, by a factor of 10 or more.
> 
> At a rough estimate, I would say that I have lost less than 80 euro
> out of 4,000 euro on-line expenditure in the last 2 years.
> But that 80 euro includes 50 euro for a ThinkPad battery
> from China which holds its charge for 5 seconds,
> and which I could probably recover from eBay if I were persistent enough.
> (I told the guy who sold it to me that it doesn't work
> but he hasn't responded.
> I doubt if this was a scam.)

I'd have no doubt that he knows he's selling low-quality goods, however.
that's a little scammy.

I've run into several scams on eBay, myself.  Thankfully in all cases I
was able to cancel my payments, and escape without loss (apart from the
time and effort required to do so).

--j.