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Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

geocod.io

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Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#41

Post by WhitneyLand »

caydenm wrote: post #29
WhitneyLand wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got called out, responded, but didn’t really address the point. Looks like the original claim was overstated.

I was referring to generated or disposable card numbers rather than stolen. maybe that is the confusion? An concrete examples of converting a user using these types of cards for free trial abuse is a user who signed up 8 week in a row using different emails, names, IPs and cards. Nudging of these users was enabled and on trying to sign up for their 9th trial they immediately switched back to their original account an…

I’m not in the that industry so maybe you’re not defining “stolen” as criminal activity?

I think many people would infer it to mean there’s a victim involved, someone’s personal credit card was stolen. If that’s the case it’s especially bizarre and not a customer you’d want to convert.

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#42

Post by compootr »

thecodemonkey wrote: post #37
EGreg wrote: post #12

Where can we get a blocklist of those throwaway email domains? or perhaps a really big whitelist of good ones? that would be extremely helpful!

There's a couple of great open source projects[1][2][3] that try to keep up-to-date lists of domains that belong to disposable email providers. I would probably not recommend implementing a whitelist for blocking purposes. But perhaps domains on a whitelist could get a slight scoring bump. [1] https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email... [2] https://github.com/disposable/disposable [3] https://gith…

As for abuse, I made myself a tool to give myself quintillions of email addresses (not using plus addressing) on gmail.com

I use this to sign up for a service with a unique email that is basically my junk box, but the email is its own unique entry in my password manager

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#43

Post by compootr »

lupusreal wrote: post #14
gwbas1c wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once did a machine learning project at Intel. The end result was that it was no better than simple statistics; but the statistics were easier to understand and explain. I realized the machine learning project was a "solution in search of a problem," and left.

Career hack: skip the machine learning and implement the simple statistics, then call it machine learning and refuse to explain it.

hack v2: call it AI

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#44

Post by AutistiCoder »

lupusreal wrote: post #14
gwbas1c wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once did a machine learning project at Intel. The end result was that it was no better than simple statistics; but the statistics were easier to understand and explain. I realized the machine learning project was a "solution in search of a problem," and left.

Career hack: skip the machine learning and implement the simple statistics, then call it machine learning and refuse to explain it.

statistical regression is also machine learning.

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#45

Post by miki123211 »

pests wrote: post #30
miki123211 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also called DaaS, "discrimination as a service"

Not sure if this was a slight but yes, payment providers and other services need to discriminate valid uses of their service from fraudulent.

I'm thinking along the lines of "let's ban all the Chinese" and "let's ban all the Russians", because that's where the abuse comes from. That's often what those models, both simple and advanced, boil down to.

American stores could prevent most shoplifting by banning people of a certain skin color from entering. The US doesn't let them do this, even though it would most definitely work. They're not allowed to do it for a very good reason, but those reasons seem to be lost to internet companies, who seemingly push so hard for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#46

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

miki123211 wrote: post #21
gwbas1c wrote: post #9

Makes me wonder how easy / hard it is to turn this kind of feature into a standalone product? IE, send email, IP, browser agent, and perhaps a few other datapoints to a service, and then get a "fraudulent" rating?

Also called DaaS, "discrimination as a service"

There's nothing wrong with trying to discriminate against bots.

If your setup makes you look like a bot, that's YOUR problem. Stop doing things that make you look like a bot.

I get that you want privacy, but so do bots.

Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse

#47

Post by pests »

miki123211 wrote: post #45
pests wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this was a slight but yes, payment providers and other services need to discriminate valid uses of their service from fraudulent.

I'm thinking along the lines of "let's ban all the Chinese" and "let's ban all the Russians", because that's where the abuse comes from. That's often what those models, both simple and advanced, boil down to. American stores could prevent most shoplifting by banning people of a certain skin color from entering. The US doesn't let them do this, even though it would most definitely work. They're not allowed to do it fo…

Except stores aren’t banning the customers from browsing or building a cart. It’s only when someone goes to pay does the fraud detection run and block the transaction. What the US does allow companies to do, like Walmart, is run “background checks” on you before allowing you to cash a check. Over the years I’ve known many with problematic banking history or bad credit who would get denied from this.

I agree blanket bans like you bring up would be problematic and wrong, but I see nuance in using, say, the country of origin as one of the factors in their risk assessment.

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