This is the sort of casual prejudice about eastern europe that I despise. Sure you can probably say something like "well I just picked Eastern Europe at random" but I think we all know that's not the case, and that's a little sad.
"Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5
million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This
paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than
elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and
entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look
critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from
an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were
seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where
individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to
Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of
Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet
penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those
charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why. "
I'm only one data point, but I've had three credit cards used maliciously. Each pre-auth for 1 dollar came from a company somewhere in Europe. After my card had been shut off, I would get a call asking about transactions, and they would all start off with that similar transaction.
Perhaps the person stealing the information is based anywhere, but the company commonly issuing the pre-auths is in Europe?
