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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

> Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic in many domains, not just LinkedIn.

Yep. This is how the 3 major credit bureaus is the United States to verify your identity. Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDES to fake.

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>Seasoned accounts are a positive heuristic

I've found for the most part account age/usage is not considered at all in major online service providers.

I've straight up been told by Google, Ebay and Amazon that they do not care about account age/legitimacy/seasoning/usage at all and it is not even considered in various cases I've had with these companies.

They simply don't care about customers at all. They are only looking at various legal repercussions balanced against what makes them the most money and that is their real metric.

Ebay: Had a <30day old account make a dispute against me that I did not deliver a product that was over $200 when my account was in good standing for many years with zero disputes. Ebay told me to f-off, ebay rep said my account standing was not a consideration for judgement in the case.

Google: Corporate account in good standing for 8+ years, mid five figure monthly spending. One day locked the account for 32 days with no explanation or contact. At day 30 or so a CS rep in India told me they don't consider spending or account age in their mystery account lockout process.

Amazon: Do I even need to...

Eventually, some of these companies will realize that a well-managed customer service org is a profit center and they will get an enormous amount of business. Unfortunately, they'll all keep fucking over customers until they realize that accepting life in the crab bucket is a negative-sum game.

I'm considering going back to school to write a "Google Fi 2016-2023: A Case Study in Enshittification" thesis but I'm not sure what academic discipline it fits under.

(I'll say it again for those in the back, if you're looking for ideas, there's arbitrage in service.)

Try philosophy, you would need good logic to get the necessary peer reviewed publications ;-)

Unfortunately ebay has a lock on large parts of the market and only a small number of people have been called frauds by them. I personally can't buy from you because they have decided my account is compromised, but I'm just one person and so that is a tiny number of potential customers.

But account takeover gives all these bona fides.

Same in the UK (which is currenty a contentious issue again with Digital ID), because there is no concept of having a cryptographic signature tied to your identity in the way it is done in other EU countries.

Instead you need: - five years of address history - a recent utility bill or a council tax bill that has your full address - maybe a bank statement - passport or driving license

It just so happens that Experian, etc. have all of that, and even background checking agencies will depend on it.

Council Tax bills may be possible to fake. I received a paper one yesterday for an unknown name, someone had registered online that they were moving to my address which cancelled my own account, I guess they could have asked for a copy of the bill to be emailed to them.

I’d imagine that all of this stuff is extremely easy to fake if you’re willing to take a small risk of getting in a lot of trouble. Nobody is really “verifying” council tax bills or utility bills because there is no procedure for doing so.

Wait what? In UK you don't have Qualified Certificate tied to person, which can be used to sign documents, communicate with banks etc. No way.

Nope.

> Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDEST to fake.

Only if you don’t plan ahead. I can’t remember which book/movie/show it was from, but there was a character who spent decades building identities by registering for credit cards, signing up for services, signing leases, posting to social media, etc so that they could sell them in the future. Seems like it would be trivial to automate this for digital only things.

That is a "valid" scam idea. However it is tricky to pull off. If anyone you sell the account to is investigated they may find you and can possibly get you on fraud even before they cannot arrest your customer. You also need to sell all these accounts - investigators look for and hang out in the places where such services are sold just so they can buy from you first and then shut you down (they don't know of all such places and eventually shut down the ones you know of). There are also suspicion that investigators are running that same plan and so nobody smart will buy because they can't be sure you are not the police.

There are probably more ways this can fail.

But this is happening all the time. These accounts are sold anonymously and from countries where it is hard to find the culprit and harder to prosecute. It's the primary reason WHY companies like eBay, Amazon, and Google DON'T care about your account age or activity.

Sounds a bit like the practice of shelf companies, where people create companies, give them a basic history with the tax department, etc, purely for the purpose of selling them to people who need a company with such a history to .. hide things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_corporation

> Your residence history and your presences on the distributed Internet is the HARDES to fake.

When I was 18 with little to no credit trying to do things. Financial institutions would often hit me with security questions like this.

But, I was incredibly confused because many of the questions had no valid answer. Somehow these institutions got the idea that I was my stepmother or something and started asking me about address and vehicles she owned before I ever knew her.

Not to be rude, but... uh... did your step mom steal your identity and use it for stuff? Minors are huge targets for that sort of stuff because generally no one is checking a 10 year old's credit

10 year olds cannot legally do a lot of things. Other things they can do, but the law gets weird. Not that you are wrong - kids are a target, but there are a lot of protections.

Though if step mom shares your name (not unlikely if OP is a girl with a common name) it isn't a surprise that they will mix you up.

That's why you don't fake it. You steal it.

sucks to be young I guess.

Always has.

Sure, but nobody expects a 23 year old to have a two decade old LinkedIn account or work history.

(Except maybe the sorts of idiots who write job descriptions requiring 10+years of experience with some tech that's only 2 years old, and the recruiters who blindly publish those job openings. "Mandatory requirements: 10+ years experience using ChatGPT. 5+ years experience deploying MCP servers.")

>Except maybe the sorts of idiots who write job descriptions requiring 10+years

so.. most of them?

Anyway the problem is not a hiring person expecting it, it's systems written with not enough thought that will expect it for them, and flag the people as untrustworthy who do not match expectations.

That's funny.

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