The thing about the situation actually described was everything happened on a fairly large scale but it was far from given - a lot of transactions failed for various reasons not necessarily implying the FBI was making a systematic effort to stop them. Indeed, Krebs was making a systematically effort to stop them and they just kept going.

That'll still hurt the margins - a lot of these cyber crimes are only cost effective at scale and only hitting a few people successfully can deter folks to easier revenue streams - they care about margins as much as anyone else.

I'm curious what you think the margin is for this endeavor. Is it like the food wholesale business which retains a 2% net margin after all expenses? Or is it like Google with net margins of 18% or thereabouts?

Costs consist of writing and updating the malware itself, maintaining C&C servers and hiring mules to cash out the proceeds with an 8% commission.

Maybe there are kickbacks to government authorities, though I understand kickbacks are often payments in kind, by sharing exploits with intelligence agencies.

I mean, logically, the take home has to be pretty decent, but it's not approaching the take homes that drug cartel's tend to get, so they probably lose big big chunks of profit to local corruption. Otherwise you'd see the same thing you see in central america - the immense profit potential slowly militarizes the entire industry and you've got private armies tooling about.

From what we've seen out of Russia, the militarization of hacking hasn't yet evolved to private armies - so either it's all being controlled by an existing (maybe the government) or early emergent (maybe a shiny new oligarch) player or the profit margins just aren't enough to justify violence. As soon as you can make 200k by robbing a criminal you'll see it happen though.