Through work with law enforcement investigators, Jackson has seen losses of $200,000, but because he believes he is seeing only about 10 percent of the operation, he believes total losses could be as high as $1m

...and he's in charge of a financial investigation??

Perhaps he's seeing the most successful 10 percent based on other details too boring for print. Of course, Stan truly wants to believe in simple proportions, because trolls' hands are so big.

Just goes to show how meaningless most statistics printed or reported are. Stating "10% of the operation" means absolutely nothing. How do you define "the operation", is it value of fraud, number of fraudulent transactions, number of people caught carrying out fraudulent transactions, etc., etc.

You'll find that many media sources (not just El Reg), quote meaningless statistics all the time, stats that *sound* as though they make sense, but when you actually stop to think about it mean less than nothing, and are just pretty window dressing to make the article seem as though there is actually some scientific analysis in there.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that 99% of articles quoting statistics are just plain nonsense.

87.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 8 out of 10 people know that!

/coat

Key information isn't it?

I know its only numbers, but if they're only seeing 10% of the fraud (and yes, I know they're guessing at that) then surely it would be $2m and not $1m if they've had reports of $200k so far?

of people make up three quarters of the population.

Bank stealing trojans like this have been around for years, and have stolen much more money than this. Not sure why this is being considered news.