4 ms·

> That's amazing, it took them 3 months to kill a scam app, but they proactively shutdown smaller apps that break no rules constantly. There is a specific reas

> That's amazing, it took them 3 months to kill a scam app, but they proactively shutdown smaller apps that break no rules constantly. There is a specific reason for this. The scammers are repeat players. They have a thousand accounts, three quarters of them get shut down, they look at the other 250 to see what's different, make 1000 more accounts that look more like the ones that didn't get shut down, now only half of them get shut down and they get even more data on how to avoid getting banned. Meanwhile the ordinary user has only one account, maybe two or three for small businesses and things. If one account gets shut down their life is disrupted and they have no idea why it happened or what to do about it or how to avoid it happening again. Google have to shut down 1000 accounts for this one scammer and if they get 999 of them right and 1 of them wrong, the scammer still has an account and the honest user doesn't. The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. They can't make 1000 more accounts from prison and then Google don't have to play whack a mole while clobbering tons of innocent people.

coding123 2y ago
So if you have 1000 accounts, doesn't that mean you've submitted 1000 apps to the store or something?
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  I guess you make the same app and tweak it slightly 1000 times, since it's a low quality app probably it doesn't matter
Calavar 2y ago
> The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. That would be ideal, but getting 195 countries on the same page on cybercrime just isn't going to happen. As it is we have multiple countries where the government actively sponsors internet scammers.
- matsz 2y ago
  At this point, Google should accept new sign-ups for critical products ONLY from countries that have a functioning law enforcement system when it comes to this - and check based on ID card/passport.
- jart 2y ago
  It would be a lot simpler if cyberspace was declared a sovereign territory and Google became the official government of it, answerable to no other government on questions of digital affairs. That way they'd have the power to put all the spammers and ransomware gangs in their goolag for a very long time. Think this is a bad idea? Great for you. Keep letting people like Donald Trump be your digital government. Heck, make Google the government of meatspace too. If every neightborhood in America was run as well as a Google office, we'd all be living in paradise. Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions.
  - nabla9 2y ago
    > Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions. Corporations are only efficient when they have corporate responsibilities. Corporations do only efficiency and can select customers. Government must guarantee equality and rights for everyone. Even criminals are citizens with rights. Let me demonstrate. This is how Google would do it: (1) Algorithm captures 90% of all criminals (it's a good algorithm) (2) 5% (1/20) change that flagged account is a criminal (95% false positives) (3) 0.01% (1/10000) of all accounts are flagged. There are around 246 million unique Google users in the US. Closing just 24,600 accounts removes 90% of criminals. 90% change of capture is a good deterrent. Google also removes 23,370 innocent accounts. GOOGLE DOES THIS ALREADY. It's efficient and well-run (actual numbers may vary) but also brutal and unjust. Legacy government institutions do their job better than Google would.
    - jart 2y ago
      Do you really believe the government is what gives you your rights?
simion314 2y ago
>The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. They can't make 1000 more accounts from prison and then Google don't have to play whack a mole while clobbering tons of innocent people. How can a scammer make 1000 accounts? Don't they need to give Google Store some gov ID, credit card number? If this are too easy for scammers to get then ask for more documents that a legit company or developer would have. And you can make this more strict stuff optional, if you do not provide this documents your activity and reports are treated 100x more seriously. My suspicion is that companies are using AI crap to handle user reports, some devs very exited to work on this cool new tech where they can replace even more people in support and QA with scripts.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  As a user, I've had to jump through a lot of hoops like captcha, credit card number, phone number check, dns domain check etc. I've been told these are to prevent scammers making 1000 accounts. Now they tell me "well we can't prevent scammers, because they make 1000 accounts". I am beginning to think someone is not 100% truthful to me.
  - 0xdada 2y ago
    There is a cost to breaking captcha.
  - simion314 2y ago
    Yeah, some companies are happy to let the bots thrive, I use reddit a lot and I would prefer to have 2 tiers of account,s, validated as real humans and not validated, then I would prefer if developers could do their job and put limits on non validated accounts with bot like activity. Bu they are happy with bots, I see people getting banned and getting back with a new account with same name just a small change there. We had the case with Elon Musk complaining about bots and after the took over I read that he is fine with bots now,especially the ones that pay for the blue check mark. I also wish police would do more in the cases of impersonation, where scammers impersonate people or institution, if this people are from a different country and that country does not collaborate then sanction them.
Timshel 2y ago
Might be true but at the same time if it takes you three months to process/verify a complaint from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you probably are doing a crap job. Which in turn make it that much easier for scammer. > The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. What a joke how can you believe that international justice will be fast enough to handle the issue of scammer spamming apps ... In the end those app are probably against the store TOS and if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS you can argue it's partially on them.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS The penalties for violating terms of service generally have no teeth (they close your account, they don't sue you for damages), and you don't want it to be otherwise because ordinary people are constantly violating the terms as well, which are written specifically with the intent that everyone is constantly violating them so the company can always claim that anyone is in violation. But if you close a scammer's account they just make a new one. Which is why violations of the law need to be handled by law enforcement, who have to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt but then can impose a penalty that actually acts as a deterrent.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    You're right, scammers will likely just make new accounts and publish new apps, but if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen. The justice system should eventually track down and lock up the people responsible, but the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen. But this is the same problem. They're using some unreliable heuristics to detect this sort of thing and they have false positives. So you're proposing that they authoritatively assert that something is a scam and destroy the reputation of untold innocent people on the basis of some unreliable machine learning algorithm. The innocent people would sue them and it would be hard to blame them. > the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes. Except that they can't, because they don't have a fact finding apparatus that can accurately determine if a crime is being committed or not.
passion__desire 2y ago
Why can't they do deduplication of the same apk code being submitted and map all those accounts to a known history of shutdown accounts. Seems like a simple way out?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

coding123 2y ago

So if you have 1000 accounts, doesn't that mean you've submitted 1000 apps to the store or something?

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
I guess you make the same app and tweak it slightly 1000 times, since it's a low quality app probably it doesn't matter

Calavar 2y ago

> The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. That would be ideal, but getting 195 countries on the same page on cybercrime just isn't going to happen. As it is we have multiple countries where the government actively sponsors internet scammers.

matsz 2y ago
At this point, Google should accept new sign-ups for critical products ONLY from countries that have a functioning law enforcement system when it comes to this - and check based on ID card/passport.
jart 2y ago
It would be a lot simpler if cyberspace was declared a sovereign territory and Google became the official government of it, answerable to no other government on questions of digital affairs. That way they'd have the power to put all the spammers and ransomware gangs in their goolag for a very long time. Think this is a bad idea? Great for you. Keep letting people like Donald Trump be your digital government. Heck, make Google the government of meatspace too. If every neightborhood in America was run as well as a Google office, we'd all be living in paradise. Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions.
- nabla9 2y ago
  > Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions. Corporations are only efficient when they have corporate responsibilities. Corporations do only efficiency and can select customers. Government must guarantee equality and rights for everyone. Even criminals are citizens with rights. Let me demonstrate. This is how Google would do it: (1) Algorithm captures 90% of all criminals (it's a good algorithm) (2) 5% (1/20) change that flagged account is a criminal (95% false positives) (3) 0.01% (1/10000) of all accounts are flagged. There are around 246 million unique Google users in the US. Closing just 24,600 accounts removes 90% of criminals. 90% change of capture is a good deterrent. Google also removes 23,370 innocent accounts. GOOGLE DOES THIS ALREADY. It's efficient and well-run (actual numbers may vary) but also brutal and unjust. Legacy government institutions do their job better than Google would.
  - jart 2y ago
    Do you really believe the government is what gives you your rights?

simion314 2y ago

>The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. They can't make 1000 more accounts from prison and then Google don't have to play whack a mole while clobbering tons of innocent people. How can a scammer make 1000 accounts? Don't they need to give Google Store some gov ID, credit card number? If this are too easy for scammers to get then ask for more documents that a legit company or developer would have. And you can make this more strict stuff optional, if you do not provide this documents your activity and reports are treated 100x more seriously. My suspicion is that companies are using AI crap to handle user reports, some devs very exited to work on this cool new tech where they can replace even more people in support and QA with scripts.

lucianbr 2y ago
As a user, I've had to jump through a lot of hoops like captcha, credit card number, phone number check, dns domain check etc. I've been told these are to prevent scammers making 1000 accounts. Now they tell me "well we can't prevent scammers, because they make 1000 accounts". I am beginning to think someone is not 100% truthful to me.
- 0xdada 2y ago
  There is a cost to breaking captcha.
- simion314 2y ago
  Yeah, some companies are happy to let the bots thrive, I use reddit a lot and I would prefer to have 2 tiers of account,s, validated as real humans and not validated, then I would prefer if developers could do their job and put limits on non validated accounts with bot like activity. Bu they are happy with bots, I see people getting banned and getting back with a new account with same name just a small change there. We had the case with Elon Musk complaining about bots and after the took over I read that he is fine with bots now,especially the ones that pay for the blue check mark. I also wish police would do more in the cases of impersonation, where scammers impersonate people or institution, if this people are from a different country and that country does not collaborate then sanction them.

Timshel 2y ago

Might be true but at the same time if it takes you three months to process/verify a complaint from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you probably are doing a crap job. Which in turn make it that much easier for scammer. > The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. What a joke how can you believe that international justice will be fast enough to handle the issue of scammer spamming apps ... In the end those app are probably against the store TOS and if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS you can argue it's partially on them.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS The penalties for violating terms of service generally have no teeth (they close your account, they don't sue you for damages), and you don't want it to be otherwise because ordinary people are constantly violating the terms as well, which are written specifically with the intent that everyone is constantly violating them so the company can always claim that anyone is in violation. But if you close a scammer's account they just make a new one. Which is why violations of the law need to be handled by law enforcement, who have to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt but then can impose a penalty that actually acts as a deterrent.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  You're right, scammers will likely just make new accounts and publish new apps, but if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen. The justice system should eventually track down and lock up the people responsible, but the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen. But this is the same problem. They're using some unreliable heuristics to detect this sort of thing and they have false positives. So you're proposing that they authoritatively assert that something is a scam and destroy the reputation of untold innocent people on the basis of some unreliable machine learning algorithm. The innocent people would sue them and it would be hard to blame them. > the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes. Except that they can't, because they don't have a fact finding apparatus that can accurately determine if a crime is being committed or not.

passion__desire 2y ago

Why can't they do deduplication of the same apk code being submitted and map all those accounts to a known history of shutdown accounts. Seems like a simple way out?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]