This reads like it was written by someone who saw the film swordfish and thought it was accurate. I particularly found the breathless 'he could break in to almost any on-line bank at any time' stuff a bit hard to swallow. There was nothing terribly chilling about the story.
If you ignore the "super hacker" cliche, which I agree is lazy and simplistic, then there is something arguably chilling, or at least sad, about the story. The best and brightest coming up (without alternatives, according to the article) into a life of crime, because their circumstances and environment don't afford the opportunity to succeed as anything else.
Stealing financial information is a lot different than stealing specific financial information. Anyone can dumpster dive, but the trick is knowing what dumpster contains the information on a mark.
I didn't consider dumpster diving when I hear about laptops of millions of customer data stolen and social exploits. Those social exploits are having bank employees put keyloggers indirectly on their own computers and being able to read any kind of information in the system.
Considering that he's doing it from Lagos, it might also mean that security is not very strong.
Author's uncritical fascination with those scammers makes the article quite annoying to read. Leaving ethical issues aside, spamming does not seem to be technically challenging. Especially if you live in a country where the law enforcement is too weak to prosecute cybercrimes.
What was described was definitely not spamming. It might start off that way to find a mark, but afterwards there's a lot of challenges (for example the story at the end, of the scammers posing as women and making men fall in love with them).
So you're looking for partisan reporting that more closely follows your own opinion? There is two sides to a lot of stuff and its certainly interesting to hear this side of the story.
The writer speaks of the Valley as a religion, for which he is a missionary. The story is a tale of those saved and those lost; as if Boakye is a miserable, lawless wretch who could be saved if only he would join the cult. Save the children! Their genius would surely be rewarded if only they came to the Valley! Then they could quit their life of illegal, mental prostitution and create scientifically addictive web games for us to distract the masses, sell their personal details and make our fortunes! Look how much better we are!
Please. The only thing chilling is that I can't read about a smart kid in Lagos without feeling like I'm being sold a religion. Seems to me that Boakye is doing what all smart people do and finding his own path in life. If he has done anything actually harmful, the writer has only alluded to it.
The whole article is very poorly written, typical Tech Crunch garbage. Even if Ibrahim Boakye is everything that he is portrayed to be in the article there is no way he could just get into any bank account he wished, with just the name of a victim and an internet connection, that's simply not how "hacking" a bank account works. You would think a site named "Tech Crunch" would actually know something about tech.
It's only standard insofar as Sara Lacy, now a regular TC writer, wrote it. I was a regular reader of TC at the time Sarah Lacy was transitioned (stolen?) from Businessweek, after a similar longer form write up she did about venture capitalists received high praise. Paul Carr is another writer who transitioned to TC from a more mainstream writing background, the UK's The Guardian, I believe. Not sure of any others.
Edit: a vote down? For inaccuracy (I believe it's accurate), or dislike of the writers mentioned?
I thought the article was written quite badly... If you're interested in these sorts of stories, there's some great books out there (usually in the form of a autobiography).
What interested me more than anything was actually having a journalist out somewhere reporting. This kind of reporting can be somewhat rare in this day and age.
I never knew TechCrunch did stuff like that so I was certainly impressed.
The writer's point about it being harder to make money with internet scams is the result of the normal "learning curve" of criminal enterprise--where the victims learn to protect themselves. It is the real reason "crime doesn't pay", at least not for long. Protecting yourself from a scammer, or even from actual physical theft, is easier than doing the crime, so successful criminals need to keep ahead of the reaction.
Also, the comment about the mangled syntax misunderstands its purpose--the surest way to a successful con is to make the mark feel smarter than the conman. As several people have observed, most cons work by making the mark think he is going to get something for nothing, or at least for less than its worth.
I just finished reading Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power about a month ago, so all this is near the top of my mind right now; a lot of his illustrative anecdotes involved conmen.
There were things he could just do that no other kids– let alone adults– could understand.
I don't know if I am just misreading this, but it sounds odd to me (like they are saying the kids would more readily understand it than any adults could).
I think this was written under the assumption that only children are smart enough to use electronic equipment.
This was a common theme in the 80s and early 90s when talking about computers and videogames and setting the clock on your VCR to something other than 12:00.
It was a pretty standard trope in the 1980s and 1990s that kids learned to use electronic gear from VCRs to Apple computers much faster than adults did - maybe they had more free time, more curiosity, or were just less set in thier ways.
There was a lot of truth in it. You see something similar today - parents marvelling over a child who can play on an iPad before then can even talk.
