The hilarious thing is that that excuse is essentially just security through obscurity. Which is especially rich coming from the company whose vulnerability research team famously set a hard disclosure deadline that was shorter than many others at the time.
Re:Why is it so hard to give Google money?
by imajoredinecon on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @09:22PM
(#32245992)
The engineering reality is that, much of the time, information asymmetry is a big help when you’re an anti-abuse engineer trying to build systems that distinguish good traffic from bad. It’s not an “undisclosed vulnerability” to build a very effective heuristic that wouldn’t be effective if it were public knowledge.
That’s the kind of thing that’s useful for some random blogger’s personal domain and largely academic at Google’s scale.
Re:Why is it so hard to give Google money?
by jeffffff on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @11:01AM
(#32251299)
you would be shocked at how effective simple things like this are at stopping 90%+ of the bad actors, leaving significantly less manual work to identify the remaining 10%
And Google aren't the only offenders here. On Tumblr (now owned by Automattic) the only support case type where you're guaranteed to NOT receive answers is for the reason "account termination".
Yet, while this is often the cited reason, it is simply not true.
There is no way on Earth, that scammers don't find out about such restrictions trivially, easily. So all this really does, is inconvenience the honest, and do zip, zero, nada to hassle the miscreants.
edit: more thought here, likely this is just an excuse, to not properly train reps, or to not deal with the issue at all.
It is the equiv of "think of the children!", but corp speak instead of politi speak. "Sorry for the bad service, security issue!"