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Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

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Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#181

Post by rjmunro »

hnben wrote: post #173
jonathanlydall wrote: post #110

The problem with internet fraud is that no one is really trying to make the fraudsters accountable for their actions, instead what they’re doing is essentially “shoo’ing them away”, and fraudsters after being shoo’ed away simply try again until they, almost invariably, eventually do succeed. Subsequently, the industry of fraud is generally lucrative and is thus constantly growing. When I worked at Blizzard, there wer…

> but there was no process for reporting the fraudsters what would be good incentives to make companies like blizzard start reporting fraudsters? I am thinking along the line: companies can pay $X to make a report, and will receive $X 5 if that reports leads to a fine. And they have to pay additional $X 10 if that reports turns out to be frivolous. (If the report appears to be valid, but doesn't result in a fine, tha…

> what would be good incentives to make companies like blizzard start reporting fraudsters?

Having someone to report them to?

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#182

Post by bongodongobob »

Nextgrid wrote: post #151
bongodongobob wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what can you do? Trace their IP back to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer? Then what? Start kicking doors down? Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase? Reminds me of Lebowski asking the cops about his Credence tape.

> to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer? Legislation can be changed so people are considered responsible for the abuse that comes from their network unless they can pass the buck to someone else. This will quickly cause those Windows XP machines to fall off the internet unless their owners fancy constantly being bogged down in legal trouble. > Going to get the FBI involved f…

Probably anything under $1000, yes.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#183

Post by Majromax »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #20

The author seems to be mistaking the benefit of selection effects with competence. Those who work anti-fraud for platforms know that there is something like a market for fraud. There is a market clearing quantity of fraud that will be present on any platform, dictated by the gains from learning to execute the exploit, the effort necessary to do so, and the number of times one might be able to do it. Small platforms h…

> The author seems to be mistaking the benefit of selection effects with competence. [...] The big platforms actually are radically more competent at anti-fraud / anti-spam / etc, but the scope of their operations make them such juicy targets that there is a lot of it anyways.

The author addresses this point in one of the appendices:

>> A standard extension of this idea that I frequently hear is that big companies actually do have the best anti-spam and anti-fraud, but they're also subject to the most sophisticated attacks. I've seen this used as a justification for why big companies seem to have worst anti-spam and anti-fraud than a forum like HN. While it's likely true that big companies are subject to the most sophisticated attacks, if this whole idea held and it were the case that their systems were really good, it would be harder, in absolute terms, to spam or scam people on reddit and Facebook than on HN, but that's not the case at all.

This response makes intuitive sense. If the big companies are indeed more effectively competent at anti-abuse/anti-fraud measures, then the fraud that does slip through should be more subtle and less obvious, particularly over a prolonged period.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#184

Post by Jochim »

michaelt wrote: post #168
saagarjha wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It doesn't have to the founder on every call if you are looking to scale.

It depends if your revenue scales as fast as abuse scales. Amazon should be able to keep on top of fraud easily, twice the sales means twice the revenue means they can afford twice the fraud checks, if they want to. That fake $30 "2tb microsd card" puts $30 of real money in their bank account. But for something like Twitter, revenue is only vaguely related to number of tweets. That "elon musk wants to give you free d…

Then their business isn't viable.

The alternative is that we allow businesses to externalise those costs onto society.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#185

Post by nradov »

mncharity wrote: post #109
malfist wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't for the life of me figure out what you're trying to say

One builds systems out of humans, ML, and other computation. Ideally integrating the strengths of each, and doing fine-grained mutual compensation for the weaknesses of each. For instance, automated task management which delegates easy cases to ML, and orchestrates humans for harder cases. When a post is rated, a system ideally learns about the post, the poster, the rater, and the rating question. The candy machine w…

Sounds expensive. I don't see how a platform for user generated content such as X could do that profitably given that the expected value of each user is so low.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#186

Post by klabb3 »

rashkov wrote: post #85
Loughla wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like not having annoying email 'signatures' What?

I used to work IT helpdesk and once spent weeks trying to find out why my company’s emails were getting bounced all of the sudden. We had just switched to Microsoft’s hosted exchange (office 365) so we figured that must be it. I escalated the issue until I got some very technical folks on the phone, but all they could say was that everything looked 100% fine and that something we were sending was tripping the spam fi…

I mean that one was pretty obvious. Why on earth send a bit.ly link in every email? You have a-hrefs in email, so the link doesn’t even need to be shortened.

> I got some very technical folks on the phone, but all they could say was that everything looked 100% fine and that something we were sending was tripping the spam filters

This “we won’t tell you what triggered it because it helps the spammers” is… questionable, and it feels like security by obscurity. Yes, it may help the spammers a little but not possibly enough to warrant the black hole of debugging legit issues.

The right way to fight spammers isn’t about arms racing with hyper-advanced content filtering. Instead, we need to make it uneconomical.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#187

Post by Majromax »

Nextgrid wrote: post #161
Animats wrote: post #82

This is easy to fix. Make Amazon responsible for warranting all sales on their platform. Amazon claims they are not the seller, some anonymous party running an ad on their platform is the seller. That was litigated in Pennsylvania, and when it got to the level that Amazon was looking at a major lose, Amazon settled to avoid a precedent. On the ad front, anyone who runs an ad for a third party should have to be able t…

> That was litigated in Pennsylvania, and when it got to the level that Amazon was looking at a major lose, Amazon settled to avoid a precedent. That seems like a problem in our legal system though. It basically means you can force your opponent through a long & expensive legal process (hoping they'd give up or run out of resources in the meantime) and still not risk anything yourself as you can abort the whole thing…

> That seems like a problem in our legal system though.

The civil legal system is designed to settle essentially private disputes between parties. It is not really a matter of public interest whether my neighbour or I bear the liability for the tree branch that hits my parked car during a storm.

Your discomfort arises because the actions of large companies are matters of public interest, such that a notionally 'private' dispute can still affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Class-action lawsuits are one way to shoehorn this sort of dispute into the court system, but the other way is regulation. Depending on the framework, regulators can issue orders themselves or bring court cases for the sake of public interest. Unfortunately, good, timely, and competent regulation is its own hard problem.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#188

Post by danaris »

godelski wrote: post #122
jonathanlydall wrote: post #110

The problem with internet fraud is that no one is really trying to make the fraudsters accountable for their actions, instead what they’re doing is essentially “shoo’ing them away”, and fraudsters after being shoo’ed away simply try again until they, almost invariably, eventually do succeed. Subsequently, the industry of fraud is generally lucrative and is thus constantly growing. When I worked at Blizzard, there wer…

This is why I have a problem with a lot of the legal structure and incentives. If you measure in number of arrests you aren't solving the problems. I'm not sure there's any good metric to measure that. To take an analogy I'll mention the drug war. The main target was always low level drug dealers and users. They're easy to arrest and easy to say you're doing something. But they are fairly inconsequential to the busin…

I mean, the problem with the War on Drugs is that the drugs were only ever a symptom—while it's true that some small percentage of people would try, and get addicted to, drugs otherwise, the vast majority of addicts were people trying to fill a major hole in their lives. Treating addiction as a disease instead of a moral failing or a crime, legalizing drugs, and making sure that people who want to quit have resources available to do so, are all vastly more effective at reducing the illegal drug trade, as other countries have found.

In a similar way, a huge amount of this fraud would disappear if we took more known-to-be-effective measures to combat poverty (because many of these fraud techniques rely on hiring a whole bunch of desperate people to help keep it going): things like providing housing, single-payer health care, and universal basic income.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#189

Post by politician »

jakewins wrote: post #157
BrenBarn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I forgot to repeat the part about "extremely large" there. But I mean like "all economies of scale beyond a certain point". In any case, I'm not sure I agree that economies of scale are the thing keeping food on the table. Like, yes, we want nails to be made in some efficient way, but that's not what I mean by "economies of scale". What I'm talking about is the size of the companies involved. If there are 10…

I’m being unnecessarily confrontational because I’m having a bad day, sorry, that’s not helpful. I would say this: I agree with you that massive faceless monopolies with no accountability are terrible, and often a direct consequence of economies of scale. It is also , simultaneously , true that the labour saving effects - human hours spent per calorie of food or pair of socks - is a number of orders of magnitude such…

A way out: Does your example apply beyond the necessities of basic survival? We can take it as an axiom that it would not serve humanity for oxygen to be distributed on credit on the Moon.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#190

Post by bongodongobob »

godelski wrote: post #123
bongodongobob wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what can you do? Trace their IP back to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer? Then what? Start kicking doors down? Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase? Reminds me of Lebowski asking the cops about his Credence tape.

> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase? Sure, why not? And if you're at the scale is Blizzard I'm sure it's a lot more than $20. We're collecting all kinds of information these days. Surveillance capitalism is a common term for it. Data is gold they say. So why not give that data to people that can use it to stop crime?

Blizzard doesn't get paid for reporting fraud. They lose money. So what's the incentive for them to give a damn? They'll just push it back to the CC companies to deal with, if anything.
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