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70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world.

"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."

https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GI-T...

by kgeist3 hours ago|

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Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN).

For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.

by marginalia_nu3 hours ago|

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Prigozhin falling out of the metaphorical window also seems to have tempered the amount of political stuff coming directly from Russia.

by expedition322 hours ago|

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Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous.

Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us

No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.

by marginalia_nu2 hours ago|

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It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either.

Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.

by sunaookami1 hours ago|

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>A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia.

If you trust your government's propaganda that is used to jusitfy "hackbacks" and buying 0-days on the darkweb that fucks us all.

by marginalia_nu1 hours ago|

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Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%.

Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.