Imagine your city or town being dubbed the global center of hacking. It would not sit well with you. Well, for one town in Romania, that is exactly the tag it has. Full of hackers and scammers it is popularly known as the global center of cybercrime.
Ramnicu Valcea or Hackerville, its popular global name saw its steep rise in global popularity is due to the massive number of eBay and Craigslist scammers in the town. Hackerville is a three-hour drive from Bucharest, the Romanian capital, but at the moment seems to be getting all the world attention, more than the capital.
To make matters worse or good, however you look at it, the town is full of flashy cars, BMWs, and Audis. All this thanks to the art of cyber scamming that most of the people in the city seem to be doing at the moment. One reporter’s article revealed that expensive cars were a common sight in the city, with Mercedes’, BMWs, Audis all bustling in the city centre. You can see twenty and thirty something men driving the cars with gold chains on their necks as they wait and fidget at traffic lights.
Hackerville only has a few citizens who have embarked into the hacking business, but the majority of the town is said to be involved in a cyber scam of some sort. Foreign buyers are the best targets, of course, and the townsfolk have managed to steal thousands of dollars in each transaction they make. And not surprisingly most of the men who have been enriched by the hacking business feel the need to spend on luxury cars.
When the first hacking crime in the town started is not known yet, but after a revolution in 1989, most of the people begun being exposed and getting access to sophisticated tools and personal computers. This is one of the main reasons for the spike in cyber crime. In 2002, the cyber crime business grew even more and fast. Cheap Internet access was given in the Internet cafes, and suddenly fake ads on eBay from the town started surfacing. Other auction sites also saw an increase in the fake ads. The fake ads coerce people into wire transferring money into the hackers and scammers’ accounts.
The town was eventually on FBI radar who kept tabs on the bigwigs from the town. Nothing much changed though even with the FBI on their heels as the townsmen still go on with their scamming business and phishing to make money, and the authorities continue looking the other way.
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