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>The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them. They can't make 1000 more accounts from prison and then Google don't have to play whack a mole while clobbering tons of innocent people.

How can a scammer make 1000 accounts? Don't they need to give Google Store some gov ID, credit card number? If this are too easy for scammers to get then ask for more documents that a legit company or developer would have. And you can make this more strict stuff optional, if you do not provide this documents your activity and reports are treated 100x more seriously.

My suspicion is that companies are using AI crap to handle user reports, some devs very exited to work on this cool new tech where they can replace even more people in support and QA with scripts.

As a user, I've had to jump through a lot of hoops like captcha, credit card number, phone number check, dns domain check etc. I've been told these are to prevent scammers making 1000 accounts. Now they tell me "well we can't prevent scammers, because they make 1000 accounts".

I am beginning to think someone is not 100% truthful to me.

There is a cost to breaking captcha.

Yeah, some companies are happy to let the bots thrive, I use reddit a lot and I would prefer to have 2 tiers of account,s, validated as real humans and not validated, then I would prefer if developers could do their job and put limits on non validated accounts with bot like activity. Bu they are happy with bots, I see people getting banned and getting back with a new account with same name just a small change there.

We had the case with Elon Musk complaining about bots and after the took over I read that he is fine with bots now,especially the ones that pay for the blue check mark.

I also wish police would do more in the cases of impersonation, where scammers impersonate people or institution, if this people are from a different country and that country does not collaborate then sanction them.

> How can a scammer make 1000 accounts? Don't they need to give Google Store some gov ID, credit card number?

Stolen credit cards and other stuff.

People also complain that creating an account of arduous (especially in developing markets) if you have to do too much to create an account.

> My suspicion is that companies are using AI crap to handle user reports, some devs very exited to work on this cool new tech where they can replace even more people in support and QA with scripts.

The complaint is from early 2023. I suspect that whatever anti-abuse systems exist on Google Play hadn't deeply integrated LLMs at this point, as this is just like a few months after the initial launch of ChatGPT.

>The complaint is from early 2023. I suspect that whatever anti-abuse systems exist on Google Play hadn't deeply integrated LLMs at this point, as this is just like a few months after the initial launch of ChatGPT.

Google had an AI before ChatGPT, remember that there was some Google developer that made a lot of noise that Google created artificial live and enslaved it or something like that ? And I said AI not LLM

Might be true but at the same time if it takes you three months to process/verify a complaint from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you probably are doing a crap job.

Which in turn make it that much easier for scammer.

> The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them.

What a joke how can you believe that international justice will be fast enough to handle the issue of scammer spamming apps ...

In the end those app are probably against the store TOS and if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS you can argue it's partially on them.

> if Google can't manage to correctly enforce their own TOS

The penalties for violating terms of service generally have no teeth (they close your account, they don't sue you for damages), and you don't want it to be otherwise because ordinary people are constantly violating the terms as well, which are written specifically with the intent that everyone is constantly violating them so the company can always claim that anyone is in violation.

But if you close a scammer's account they just make a new one. Which is why violations of the law need to be handled by law enforcement, who have to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt but then can impose a penalty that actually acts as a deterrent.

You're right, scammers will likely just make new accounts and publish new apps, but if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen.

The justice system should eventually track down and lock up the people responsible, but the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes.

> if Google took down the apps immediately and informed all users that the app they installed was a scam, they would've prevented $millions from being stolen.

But this is the same problem. They're using some unreliable heuristics to detect this sort of thing and they have false positives. So you're proposing that they authoritatively assert that something is a scam and destroy the reputation of untold innocent people on the basis of some unreliable machine learning algorithm. The innocent people would sue them and it would be hard to blame them.

> the service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) are the only ones who can - and should be obligated to - stop actively facilitating financial crimes.

Except that they can't, because they don't have a fact finding apparatus that can accurately determine if a crime is being committed or not.

God no, I don't want them to delegate the job to any sort of automated process.

> Except that they can't, because they don't have a fact finding apparatus that can accurately determine if a crime is being committed or not.

I want them to hire people who actually do the job and clean up their own mess. They need to perform extensive background checks on any application dealing with finance, which they apparently don't do at all.

If you open their website [1], you're immediately presented with an offer to make over $4000 just by registering. As soon as you click that, they even show you a 5 minute timer to put you under time pressure. This is extremely low hanging fruit in the world of obvious and less obvious scams.

[1] https://www.yobit.net/en/

> The real problem here is that we're expecting Google to do this instead of law enforcement. Is there a scammer? Arrest them.

That would be ideal, but getting 195 countries on the same page on cybercrime just isn't going to happen. As it is we have multiple countries where the government actively sponsors internet scammers.

At this point, Google should accept new sign-ups for critical products ONLY from countries that have a functioning law enforcement system when it comes to this - and check based on ID card/passport.

It would be a lot simpler if cyberspace was declared a sovereign territory and Google became the official government of it, answerable to no other government on questions of digital affairs. That way they'd have the power to put all the spammers and ransomware gangs in their goolag for a very long time. Think this is a bad idea? Great for you. Keep letting people like Donald Trump be your digital government. Heck, make Google the government of meatspace too. If every neightborhood in America was run as well as a Google office, we'd all be living in paradise. Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions.

> Even in Google's currently evil debased declined state, it's still infinitely more competent and better than your corrupt compromised legacy government institutions.

Corporations are only efficient when they have corporate responsibilities. Corporations do only efficiency and can select customers. Government must guarantee equality and rights for everyone. Even criminals are citizens with rights.

Let me demonstrate. This is how Google would do it:

(1) Algorithm captures 90% of all criminals (it's a good algorithm)

(2) 5% (1/20) change that flagged account is a criminal (95% false positives)

(3) 0.01% (1/10000) of all accounts are flagged.

There are around 246 million unique Google users in the US. Closing just 24,600 accounts removes 90% of criminals. 90% change of capture is a good deterrent.

Google also removes 23,370 innocent accounts.

GOOGLE DOES THIS ALREADY. It's efficient and well-run (actual numbers may vary) but also brutal and unjust. Legacy government institutions do their job better than Google would.

Do you really believe the government is what gives you your rights?

Government maintains a system that enables you to protect your rights, and process to participate. That system can't be very efficient, because you need to have paper trail, and bureaucratic process. It's the process that gives you change to seek justice and protect your rights.

With Google you can only post complaint to HN and wish that someone working in Google notices, or that there is enough publicity to shame them.

Maybe that's true for some governments. Or maybe it was true a long time ago. In America I question whether our government is actually even the government. One thing I like about Google is they don't claim to provide services they don't actually do. I'm glad you live in a place where the system that governs you worked well enough to earn your trust.

I'm not an American, that's true.

I think Americans have forgotten what the government is. It's the job of the people to fix and constantly maintain the government because if they don't own it, someone else will.

It seems like Reaganism never left America. People from right to left have adopted the talking points and the attitude. If there are problems in the government, it's suddenly all bullshit and good for nothing. Talk in a passive voice where the government just happens.

They don't have to get all countries on the same page; for example, they could default to only allowing apps to be sold in the country of the vendor, then expand from that to countries with an extradition treaty with the vendor's country.

Also probably not quite as hard as you make out in practice, as 27 of those countries share membership of a super-national government whose specific purpose is to make trade easier by streamlining legislative differences between them, and that block plus two other single countries constitute about 60% of the world's GDP.

Though random small-time scammers may regardless have a hard time selling in China an app made outside, and vice-versa, as even just the language barrier can be quite intense — I've played a game where the decently resourced western publisher didn't notice (or noticed but didn't fix) the fact that the "choose your name" box only had room for one character, and thus I was the only player who had an interesting name like '狐' rather than 'M'.

> they could default to only allowing apps to be sold in the country of the vendor, then expand from that to countries with an extradition treaty with the vendor's country.

You don't even need an extradition treaty. Just require some collateral for selling outside your own country. Then people selling within their own country (i.e. probably most people) don't have to post anything but are automatically in the same jurisdiction as the victim. Whereas scammers from other countries forfeit their collateral, the amount of which is set based on the amount of scams coming out of their country.

So if you have 1000 accounts, doesn't that mean you've submitted 1000 apps to the store or something?

I guess you make the same app and tweak it slightly 1000 times, since it's a low quality app probably it doesn't matter

Why can't they do deduplication of the same apk code being submitted and map all those accounts to a known history of shutdown accounts. Seems like a simple way out?