My friend Auren Hoffman just wrote a very interesting article on the growing cost consumer Internet companies face fighting scamming, phishing, hacking and government requests. He estimates that it’s a tax of around 25% in terms of inherent time, resource and mindshare.

Based on our experience at OLX, I would definitely agree. Every day we delete 40% of the new ads posted. That’s around 25,000 ads deleted per day in addition to the ones caught automatically by our spam/scam software! We also deal with numerous scams. As a result, almost half of our employees are dedicated to dealing with this problem.

You can read the full article at:
http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/05/black-hat-tarif.html