But the signup spam was a headache. I didn't want to just blackhole Tor traffic, and tried to reduce the abuse with other tools, including some custom stuff. The final straw was a customer's small business site that had a MailChimp or Constant Contact signup form. Those vendors want you to embed their code by default to render the form, so you have less control over the form itself. There were workarounds, but they all sucked.

Tor bots would sign up email addresses through this newsletter form, and then I'd have to go through and manually scrub them before newsletters went out, or the service would penalize my client for too many bounces/unsubscribes/complaints. Very nearly 100% of the abuse on that particular form came from Tor IPs.

I do not want to spend my limited time on this Earth manually sorting out bots from humans because of one particular network. Blackholing Tor made that problem disappear immediately.

VPNs are dime-a-dozen now, cheap VPSs are available from lots of vendors, there's Wireguard, there's ssh, a clever person could even set up Apache or nginx as a forward proxy with ssl from LetsEncrypt. Tor is well over 90% abusive traffic (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/). This is a Tor problem, not a me problem. There are better alternatives available.

Solution: Require sign-ups by email, so the end account must actively send your mailserver a registration message. This also turns an open-loop control system into a closed loop control system, which is inherently easier to secure / keep safe.

It's also easy to send "from" an addresses that passes SPIF/DKIM but bounces inbound mail -- not sure what reason someone would have for this other than hurting the service reputation or acting as a DoS of sorts, but it can be done.

Proper DMARC configuration is table stakes to send e-mail, which makes that anything but trivial.

Then put the form behind your monopolistic internet gatekeeper. There's no reason for a GET to redirect to a sysiphean captcha treadmill.

> . Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.

Using tor hides your IP address from the website and makes switching exit nodes very straightforward, so you can run your account take over script in peace.

So yes, you can switch exits easily, but effectively your switching from one known bad IP to another bad IP.