Internet Black Markets - Part FOUR

Sun Oct 18 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Commerce is a basic building block human society, and the biggest reason for us to be social animals. No surprises, same two factors, Ecommerce and social interactions also drove the Internet growth story. None of the story is complete without a villain and neither does this one.

This blog is fourth in the series of "Internet Black Markets". Part 1 explored domain hoarding; counterfeit products, antisocial networking and propaganda marketplaces; Part 2 detailed the traffic generators, click frauds, SEO and plagiarism and Part 3 was about money scavengers like spammers, P2P, and phishing. In this latest blog (Part 4), I have detailed the flea, dating, pornography and hatred Internet markets.

Online Flea Markets

Ebay is famous platform for sales and purchase of second hand goods. Imagine a grand flea market where anything can be sold, new or old does not matter. Internet replica of such a market would certainly be ebay.

Flea markets transactions are just impossible to track, especially when it comes to pirated and stolen goods. So, ebay like market place is totally suitable of disposing the stolen goods. Buyer and seller are related only via a third party, who handles millions of transactions every day. Such online flea markets are also suitable for offloading pirated stuff duplicate T-Shirts, defective electronics; pirated movies or stolen watches; everything gets the bids on ebay. Though there is one major difference between these flea markets, rules of society applies to local flea market but not online. One of the weirdest cases, which I came across, was that of a 22 years old Californian girl, who was selling her virginity on eBay. She claims she's doing it to pay for her college education, but a huge online debate about sexuality and morality has surfaced. ***

Illegal scope of online flea market is humongous, as laws and there enforcement is drastically different from country to country. There are many sites for selling online goods. Countries with weaker Internet norms and poor law enforcement records, have tougher time regulating such activities. So, whenever you shop on eBay ask the seller for the copy of original bill.

Online Dating/Chatting

Since last decade hundreds of dating, matchmaking and chatting websites have come and gone. We have seen websites converting to from friend finders to adult friend finders and changing their business cases from finding batch mates to bedmates. Yahoo chat messenger dethroned AOL and MSN as it had thriving public chat rooms.

Such kind of online freedom without any governmental and parental checks has given birth to the one of the most hideous form of Internet Black Market of fraud, phishing, prostitution and child abuse. Lots of online dating sites offer premium accounts and entertain their customers with their own escort services. Abusers in chat rooms lure kids from verbal to physical assaults. Voice and video chats have degraded Internet to new lows.

Pornography

As per the World Wide Web traffic analysis on website categories, most numbers of hits goes to pornographic web sites. Size of this market is so big that it asked for bailout package during recent downturn.

With spread of Internet location of the abused subject does not matter. In other words one do not have to wait before next human consignments to arrives from Eastern Europe, before new online material will get ready. Get it done in EAST and upload to the Internet. Human Trafficking, Slavery and Abuse are the three pillars of this industry, so I will restrain from giving weightage to this topic.

Hate 2.0

"The number of hate and terrorist websites has increased by a third in the past year (2008), according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center." ***
Religious zealots belonging to different Gods, racists, fascists, extremists and pluralists are part of Hate 2.0. They feed the lesser brains with hatred, anger and intolerance.

Terrorists glorify their sins on their own websites before or after causing the atrocities. These websites are hosted from the countries where Internet laws are very week or government is unwilling to do anything like Pakistan, North Korea and other terror states. Sometimes genuine websites are hacked or temporary websites come up to spread the propaganda. After 9/11 when all mode of communication were being checked by the countries world wide, Internet becomes the medium of communication between terror sleeper cells. Posting the bomb making recipes, rumors, lies and misinformation are their traits.

When we are just years away from finding life on other planets and getting ready for affordable space travel, these under grown DNAs are willing to live on earth for next tens of generations. Let it be so, Amen!

-- With this blog, I wrap up this four series article on Internet Black Markets. I have touched upon all major topics and hope this will raise awareness in my readers and they will restrain from dealing with any of the listed activity, even by mistake.

Part 1/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about domain hoarding, social networking, propaganda market and counterfeit products

Part 2/4 of this series of "Internet black markets" fraudulent activities of online money earning are explored, which include SEO, Traffic generation, plagiarism and click frauds.

Part 3/4 of this series "Internet black markets" contains the detailed information about Spamming, Phishing, Personal information market places and pirated software

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Posted at 12:00AM Oct 18, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]