Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ncallaway 1189 days ago
> There’s no silver bullet like avatar/name similarity or other forms of detection because the scammer can trivially iterate until they avoid automated detection.

I agree that there's no silver bullet, but there need to be a hundred small changes that each increase the amount of work or decrease the scammer conversion rate until their ROI is materially harmed.

Name similarity checks have a few benefits:

- Would be quite easy to implement - Increases the scammers' work which reduces their ROI - Reduces the conversion rate (because instead of a spam message coming from "Tolarian Community Collage" it now comes from "Tulrin Community Collge"; the more the spammer has to iterate on the name, the less believable it becomes)

Bonus points if you add to the moderation queue a "Rejected because this was an impersonation attempt", and now the avatar/name of that commenter goes onto the similarity detection checks for that channel.