It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address, plus a lot of companies require SMS 2FA now, and most people do not have multiple phone numbers to burn. Besides that, I think AirBnb might require you to upload government issued photo identification too, but I am not sure.

Myths that programmers believe about reality:

- Only one person can live at an address

- Two people with the same name can't live at the same address (Jr/Sr)

The one I learned on Wall St. in the 80s: SSN are not always unique or available.

Both of these myths are generally edge case enough that they're an acceptable loss to the company.

They use heuristics, but yes in general you can work around them if you're persistent enough.

>It should be trivial to ban a certain billing address,

Everything is trivial when you aren't the one who actually has to implement it.

If you ban a billing address: what if someone else moves to that address?

Haha. I had the same reaction. Clearly this person has never had to deal with addresses in a database.

There are any number of ways to represent the exact same address (apt vs. unit vs. suite vs. '#', 5 digit zip vs. 9- digit zip, st. vs. street), and there are cases where the same address serves multiple people (private/virtual mail boxes). A billing address is a loose identifier at best.

Surely almost everyone does address standardization on user inputted fields, right? You'd be silly not to do this.

But generally, you don't need to agree to it. (Which may or may not work if it's just standardized as the back-end.)

I have a couple slightly different addresses. One of which is probably 30+ years old but is still used by the two local telcos and a few local businesses.

I wonder how that's handled now... last I hear the USPS had a database on CD-ROM you could get. Wonder if its api based now?

We used to run 'zip correct' jobs for large merchants at the service bureau I worked at just out of high school. Just 'correcting' thousands/millions of addresses at a time.

You try, but sometimes you have to accept addresses as written.

Again, it just isn’t that easy.

PMB 123 456 Main st.

May or may not be the exact same mailbox as:

Suite 123 456 Main st.

My official address is on “XXXX Boxwood Cres”. Not Boxwood Cr., not Boxwood Crescent, not “Boxwood Cres.”

Of course all of those will work for mail, but if I want to transfer the deed, or do anything of legal relevance, the government needs the address to be exactly like the first one.

For every way you can think of trying to standardize it, there is an exception.

Half addresses, letters in addresses, addresses with no number, etc. All this and we haven’t even left the US yet, other countries have their own variety of whacky shit.

When I bought my house, there was actually some legal paperwork around XXXX Main St. and XXXX N. Main St. being the same thing. (It got changed at one point in the now distant past probably when the interstate cut off the old N. Main St (which exists as a short stub)).

Verizon, Comcast, and some local businesses like my propane delivery still use N. Main and I would periodically get scolded when I first moved in pre-GPS because I would give businesses coming to my house my official USPS address which was different from what was still on many maps.

With the same name? I think the probability is low enough to accept the false positive.

How fuzzy of a name check are you doing?

If I get banned as Joe Smith and address X, what if I register my new account as Joseph Smith?

Personal experience shows you can typically use the same payment method and often even the same email address (with a different alias) to get around most bans. You'll get the odd place where this doesn't work, usually because they're implementing IP bans instead of just user bans. Bans are typically, at worst, a minor inconvenience for the person/party receiving it.

> IP bans

VPN to the rescue!

A VPN would already be banned or be considered a high-risk to begin with.

You'll need a clean, residential IP. Thankfully if you're on a dynamic IP all you need to do is restart your router, or just use your phone as pretty much every carrier only uses dynamic IPs for mobile devices.

You need to verify your account with an ID or passport

A lot of people will not consider this, or will attempt it and be defeated by simple methods (e.g trying a new email address but the same number, getting _that_ address burnt in the process).