> to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer?

Legislation can be changed so people are considered responsible for the abuse that comes from their network unless they can pass the buck to someone else. This will quickly cause those Windows XP machines to fall off the internet unless their owners fancy constantly being bogged down in legal trouble.

> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase?

The alternative is effectively saying that theft under 20 bucks is decriminalized?

> The alternative is effectively saying that theft under 20 bucks is decriminalized?

Those who tried to convince a police officer to investigate a bike theft can tell you that the threshold is actually higher.

San Francisco is trying that right now, aren't they? How's that going for them?

Probably anything under $1000, yes.

$20 seems cheap; not long ago scooter operators would lose hundreds to theft at least, with little interest.

When I was at FastMail I did a lot of very manual work to not just block spammers and other abusers, but to make their life as difficult as possible. That included figuring out how to notify the people running the servers they used (including sometimes finding the IRC chat for the folks on that server and telling them they had an intruder). One of my favorite things was to redirect bounce messages that were targeted at innocent FastMail customers to the actual spammer's email address -- which I found stopped the spam from them very quickly, once their inbox filled up with thousands of bounce messages!

Personally, I think it's reasonable to care about such things, and to try to do something about it. If no-one cares or tries, then sucky people will just suck even more.

Thx for this detailed feedback.

Is there any reason why you did change mail away from Fastmail after such a long time and now use Google as Mailserver?

From the article as an example of what doesn't scale:

"...He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point "Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums". He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem..."

Seems like it's possible but not feasible to build a pipeline to scale out that sort of behavior.

Why not? It doesn't have to the founder on every call if you are looking to scale.

It depends if your revenue scales as fast as abuse scales.

Amazon should be able to keep on top of fraud easily, twice the sales means twice the revenue means they can afford twice the fraud checks, if they want to. That fake $30 "2tb microsd card" puts $30 of real money in their bank account.

But for something like Twitter, revenue is only vaguely related to number of tweets. That "elon musk wants to give you free dogecoin" tweet doesn't make them a cent.

Then their business isn't viable.

The alternative is that we allow businesses to externalise those costs onto society.

> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase?

Sure, why not? And if you're at the scale is Blizzard I'm sure it's a lot more than $20.

We're collecting all kinds of information these days. Surveillance capitalism is a common term for it. Data is gold they say. So why not give that data to people that can use it to stop crime?

Because they're in Russia or North Korea, and their bosses bosses are good friends of local police and secret services.

What exactly can FBI do about them?

Well I guess to be fair it would be a matter of Homeland Security. Either way, there are agencies who's directives are about dealing with international fraud. Global commerce comes with global agreements.

1) There's certainly cards coming from non completely sanctioned countries. This means legal pathways.

2) If fraud is prevalent and these numbers can be tracked it makes for better policy decisions. It's not uncommon knowledge that we don't have the best privacy and security. This is at least ammo to do something about it.

Blizzard doesn't get paid for reporting fraud. They lose money. So what's the incentive for them to give a damn? They'll just push it back to the CC companies to deal with, if anything.

> So what's the incentive for them to give a damn?

Do you only do things that you get paid to do?

At work? 100% yes. If it's out of scope for my role or the project, it gets kicked up.

So if it is out of scope for your role or the project you mention the issue to someone else who's job it is to resolve those types of problems or do you make no such report and just hope they figure it out themselves? It's unclear which you mean.

If we are talking about credit card fraud for World of Warcraft accounts, the cost to fight it is far higher than ignoring it or kicking it back to your credit card company. There is 0 incentive for them to care other than doing the bare minimum because it's not their problem, it's the credit card company's problem.

They offer MFA and that's all they should have to do.

Did you dodge the question because you knew that you couldn't be consistent or because you felt that bringing up a new topic was better?

> There is 0 incentive for them to care other than doing the bare minimum because it's not their problem, it's the credit card company's problem.

I don't buy this and it sounds incredibly myopic. If it wasn't "their problem" then they wouldn't be doing anything about it. Which the OP talked about. So they aren't just taking the money and letting the credit card companies handle it, that doesn't even make any sense. Credit card companies have to get the money back. Honestly, it sounds cheaper to report it if reporting it leads to a significant reduction because you then have to pay fewer people to deal with this issue and process far fewer charge-backs. It's not much work to do (literally create a program to automate filling out a forum to the gov). We're arguing over less than a week's amount of work.

Plus, it's the right thing to do. Idk about you, but money doesn't run my entire life. Letting it seems incredibly myopic as well. Money is just a tool to help me better my life but it sure isn't the only way to do that. And if we're not trying to do "the right thing" then the fuck do we even have a society for? Seriously, please reconsider your actions, because you're enabling the shittiness in society. I'm not saying you gotta be a saint, but if there's a pretty cheap action you can do to make your society any bit better, just do it.