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Comment by jonathan-kosgei | Hacker News Reader

Fraudulent activity by bots is a problem that everyone who's managed a large enough website is familiar with.

Most bots originate from cloud IPs or hide behind proxies and VPN services. Our scores ensure that the majority of legitimate users i.e. those coming from residential IPs are left alone, with captchas and other verification mechanisms shown to "high risk" users, that is, users visiting from a cloud provider's networks or a known proxy/vpn provider. This can be verified by the number of comments on this thread by users whose home internet IPs showed a high "Trust Score".

So if anything our scores help reduce the hassle or friction that legitimate users are subjected to by the fraud-fighting tactics employed by different websites.

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"Fraudulent activity by bots" is a contradiction in terms that sounds like you've just mashed distinct issues together to create an emotionally manipulative phrase. Bots are bots, fraud is fraud. "Bots" are an overstated problem - websites should want to publish their information for every type of consumption. If serving some types of consumers causes too high of a load, then the inefficient code is what needs to be fixed. And fraud is not going to be prevented by a CAPTCHA.

> our scores help reduce the hassle or friction that legitimate users are subjected to

I'm telling you right here, I am a legitimate user and when businesses fall for the garbage story you're pushing, it makes me less likely to remain their customer. Hassling customers with repeated rounds of "click on all the cars" "no you're wrong" is terrible UX. It could be understandable if it popped up after a few failed logins in a row, but putting the nagwall front and center is appalling design.

I look forward to Apple's VPN increasingly demonstrating just how wrong your marginalizing surveillance mindset is.

Bots here refers to automated traffic, and I don't think anyone on HN would be surprised by the assertion that most online fraud is automated.

I would reject that assertion, because it seems to tie a bunch of disparate issues in order to summarily "other" them. It probably makes for reassuring business metrics that are ultimately detached from reality. I'm sure my own browsing patterns are often miscatergorized into a bin of "look at how many bad guys we stopped", ultimately misleading businesses.

Please describe one specific trend/activity you're referencing, where an automated user agent specifically facilitates fraud, beyond merely facilitating users that just so happen to have fraudulent intent. Situations where augmented user agents are claimed to be prohibited via bullshit terms of service do not count.

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