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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> If I were setting up an automated abuse-report-receiving system that could automatically disable accounts, I would run some sort of filter for "is the account reporting the abuse itself a newly created account, and/or one with suspiciously low and non-human looking usage patterns?".

That does not help against these kiddy vandals mentioned in the article.

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yes, exactly why it's a hard problem to solve.

The solution is simple: Hire support people - and both train and allow them to deviate from the usual support flowcharts.

Oh, and check if they actually speak English well enough to communicate with customers. As a customer, I instantly notice outsourced callcenters.

The solution is not simple, if you're on the business management side and need to concern yourself with the fully loaded yearly office space, overhead, payroll/benefits cost of hiring hundreds of well trained, motivated, educated, english speaking customer support reps to support your 20+ million "free" customers...

It all boils down to classic capitalism: privatizing profits (money not spent on support teams) and socializing losses (wasted police funds on SWATting, often needed psychological care for victims, lost productivity due to hacks)...

Once these losses are factored in, the tide swings towards support staff. But unfortunately that won't happen any time soon.

Simple and cheap are not the same. The solution is simple, it's just also expensive. This is the general "problem" with customer support, good support is not cheap, nor is cheap support good.

The more latitude and discretion you give them, the more susceptible you'll be to social engineering attacks.

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