[jknutson]

I agree with you. When I was younger, I played a lot of Minecraft PVP servers, and for whatever reason these PVP servers cultivated a weird and toxic community of cyber criminals about them. For reference/star value, the recent headline of the kids stealing 200m in crypto via social engineering— I played with those very same people when I was younger. As in, the people who were sent to jail.

Their story repeats itself a dozen times over from my now-fragmented friend group from that time. Many young kids getting into ill-fated get rich quick schemes ranging from credit card fraud to refunding (mail fraud) all the way to sim swapping, blackmail, doxxing, and even real life violence and gang activity. A few of my earliest friends were just indicted for home invasions and armed robbery in some scheme to steal crypto. All of them from Minecraft, weirdly enough.

Anyways, those who didn’t end up in jail or “on the run” from participating in these stupid schemes, I tend to notice a common trend towards security related work. I know one guy who went from fraternizing with the same now-criminally-indicted people I hung around to working for the FBI’s cyber crimes unit (fitting, I guess). Another one now works with a defense contractor developing spyware, as far as I can tell. Many more work in different areas of cyber security and programming et al, including myself.

The cyber-crime adjacent to cyber security pipeline is very much so real.