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> [...] With organized criminals, you can't actually see what the abuse is 'worth' to them. Even without collecting events, you can calculate what the abuse is worth to you, even if the math ends up being fuzzier. At the small platform operator level (one guy running a platform, as this article), the cost can be as simple as "this pisses me off and I have weekends." They can burn forty hours bolting on JA4 fingerprinting and a disposable-email blocklist to stop an abuser whose dollar-EV to them was roughly zero. Looks irrational, and that's exactly the deterrent — abuse pricing assumes a rational counterpart, and a guy who'll overspend his own life-hours out of stubbornness is unpriceable. At any scale larger than a small operator, you also do get real numbers -- you can't perfectly price reputation, but you can price traffic and ad conversions, operational costs, LTV of customers (and conversion funnel metrics) etc, all of which don't stay still while abuse increases. > [...] That's why it's worth collecting events before acting: what the account is about, which IP network they use, whether they fake devices, whether there's any warmup prior to registration. Because that's what helps estimate whether your mitigation will actually work, and lets you respond in a balanced manner instead of under- or over-reacting. Isn't this just a way to estimate exactly how much the 'abuse' is worth to the abusers? |