Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#2I get why they don't want to share their detection mechanics for potential fraudulent signups, but that is a very interesting topic to learn and discuss.
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#3so you implemented some sort of machine learning?
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#4so you implemented some sort of machine learning?
Not at this time. Some simple heuristics go a long way and also makes it very easy to test and debug the logic.
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#5I get why they don't want to share their detection mechanics for potential fraudulent signups, but that is a very interesting topic to learn and discuss.
I would love do a more in-depth talk about this at some point with some more concrete examples.
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#6Thanks for this writeup. Whenever people complain about some service removing or making it harder to try out a free tier, I think they don't realize the amount of abuse that needs to be managed by the service providers.
"Why do things suck?" Because parasites ruined it for the rest of us.
> We have to accept a certain amount of abuse. It is a far better use of our time to use it improving Geocodio for legitimate users rather than trying to squash everyone who might create a handful of accounts
Reminds me of Patrick McKenzie's "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" [1] (wrt banking systems)
Also, your abuse-scoring system sounds a bit like Bayesian spam filtering, where you have a bunch of signals (Disposable Email, IP from Risky Source, Rate of signup...) that you correlate, no?
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#7Great writeup. Simple heuristics very often work wonders. The fraudsters are out there and try to pinch holes in your shield.
Some time ago we were running a mobile service provider and had some issues with fraudulent postpaid subscribers - however the cost of using background checking services was substantial. We solved it quite effectively by turning the background checks on when the level of fraud went over a certain threshold which made them go away for some weeks. We kept this on and off pattern for a very long time with great success as it lowered the friction to sign up significantly when turned off…
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#8so you implemented some sort of machine learning?
Not at this time. Some simple heuristics go a long way and also makes it very easy to test and debug the logic.
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.
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#9Makes 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?
Re: Keeping our free tier sustainable by preventing abuse
#10Makes 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?
This is basically what Google's reCAPTCHA v3 does: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3
The other versions of recaptcha show the annoying captchas, but v3 just monitors various signals and gives a score indicating the likelihood that it's a bot.
We use this to reduce spam in some parts of our app, and I think there's an opportunity to make a better version, but it'd be tough for it to be better enough that people would pay for it since Google's solution is decent and free.