<story><title>How  to Sniff Out Online Fakers</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/5-ways-to-sniff-out-online-fakers/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>brandonb</author><text>Hey, OP here! I work at Sift Science, who provided all the facts for this article.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s been crazy to see how far fraudsters will go to create fake accounts. We&apos;ve seen people in the Phillipines use Twilio accounts, for example, to fool SMS verification and look like a U.S. user. People scripting the creation of thousands of accounts. People distributing malware via Chrome extensions to take over legitimate users&apos; accounts.&lt;p&gt;Are any of you out there are dealing with malicious user behavior -- fraudsters, spammers, account takeover, etc.? I&apos;d be happy to answer questions!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mootothemax</author><text>Do you also look at - or have a chance to look at - timezones as reported by the user&apos;s browser, or as selected by the user?&lt;p&gt;One of my services, TweetingMachine, used to have a massive problem with spammers going out of their way to abuse it. However, before a user can schedule a tweet, they have to select their timezone.&lt;p&gt;Problem solved! There are three or four specific timezones always chosen by the bad guys, and every ten minutes a script ran through the database banning users whose timezones fell into this list.&lt;p&gt;The surprisingly thing for me was that given the effort of constantly trying to get past my other detection scripts, the spammers either never worked out what was happening, or simply didn&apos;t choose a different timezone.&lt;p&gt;In hindsight, it&apos;s quite a cute test, and one that it looks like few of the bad guys bother to adjust (i.e. the time their browser reports via JS) or are aware of.</text></comment>
<story><title>How  to Sniff Out Online Fakers</title><url>http://gigaom.com/cloud/5-ways-to-sniff-out-online-fakers/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>brandonb</author><text>Hey, OP here! I work at Sift Science, who provided all the facts for this article.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s been crazy to see how far fraudsters will go to create fake accounts. We&apos;ve seen people in the Phillipines use Twilio accounts, for example, to fool SMS verification and look like a U.S. user. People scripting the creation of thousands of accounts. People distributing malware via Chrome extensions to take over legitimate users&apos; accounts.&lt;p&gt;Are any of you out there are dealing with malicious user behavior -- fraudsters, spammers, account takeover, etc.? I&apos;d be happy to answer questions!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Nice to see your work out where it can do some good!&lt;p&gt;One of the most amazing things about running a search engine was getting a look at what bad people look for (like php exploits or out of date Wordpress themes).&lt;p&gt;I keep wondering if there is an opportunity for a &apos;fraudster alert&apos; service like the Realtime Black Hole lists where members could share IP addresses from which has originated fraudulent or hostile traffic, seems like it would make suppression easier.</text></comment>