A federal grand jury indicted MonsterCloud CEO Zohar Pinhasi last month for allegedly defrauding clients of his ransomware data recovery business, which was the subject of a 2019 ProPublica investigation.
This is a wild read. I’d recommend reading the article, but the tl;dr is…
He charged customers up to 20 times the ransom amount ($150K vs $8K in the example), paid the ransom to get their data back, and pocketed the difference as easy profit.
He refused to reveal his “trade secret” method, but it was all A-OK when they thought it was “magic”, and now everybody’s mad at being deceived. 😄
So he provided a service and charged a high markup. This is just capitalism. Those idiots could have paid the ransoms themselves but chose to outsource.
This is a wild read. I’d recommend reading the article, but the tl;dr is…
He charged customers up to 20 times the ransom amount ($150K vs $8K in the example), paid the ransom to get their data back, and pocketed the difference as easy profit.
He refused to reveal his “trade secret” method, but it was all A-OK when they thought it was “magic”, and now everybody’s mad at being deceived. 😄
Thats such a dumb idea, i cant believe he made it work so many times.
I really need to start conning people, god damn
Between this, someone stealing 2.5 billion from Binance, and the whole running America gig, I’m rethinking my life of not-crime.
So he provided a service and charged a high markup. This is just capitalism. Those idiots could have paid the ransoms themselves but chose to outsource.