Yeah, I wasn’t going to go and call that case-closed; industry tactics exposed, story at 11:00. It’s a theory and intentional or not (misspellings) I think there’s a definite possibility it’s working as described in some cases.
I like the SaaS theory too, ransomware clearly operates using exactly that model… unfortunately there’s been a few investigations and a lot of it is just the intersection of actual and economic slavery. I suspect there’s some of what you propose as well, why not, right? If we can dream it up somewhere somebody’s probably trying it. But I’d also wager that once you achieve any real proficiency at this kind of low level scam, there’s opportunity in organized computer crime, spearfishing and pretexting scams, operations with more sophisticated planning.
Clearly Predator porn.