I recommend listening to the podcast Darknet Diaries. It’s about sketchy things online, and very often has real accounts from real criminals talking about what they did and how they got caught.
Very often, people only get caught because 1) they get huge and greedy enough that many governments are actively trying to hunt them down, 2) they make a stupid mistake that tracks back to them personally.
There is no “the government can trace everything!” In reality, it’s more like “if someone does something egregious, a few people will spend months or years trying to find them. And maybe they’ll catch a lucky break.” Hacker OpSec is typically more than enough to frustrate the FBI for years. If they even care to look for attackers. The FBI can’t just show up in Romania and arrest people, either, so it takes international government cooperation. Which is slooooooow to move.
I recommend listening to the podcast Darknet Diaries. It’s about sketchy things online, and very often has real accounts from real criminals talking about what they did and how they got caught.
Very often, people only get caught because 1) they get huge and greedy enough that many governments are actively trying to hunt them down, 2) they make a stupid mistake that tracks back to them personally.
There is no “the government can trace everything!” In reality, it’s more like “if someone does something egregious, a few people will spend months or years trying to find them. And maybe they’ll catch a lucky break.” Hacker OpSec is typically more than enough to frustrate the FBI for years. If they even care to look for attackers. The FBI can’t just show up in Romania and arrest people, either, so it takes international government cooperation. Which is slooooooow to move.