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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

> outlook

> Some of the most fraudulent email domains are operated by Microsoft. Why could this be? Two possible reasons are that 1) Microsoft has been around for a lot longer and 2) email addresses were easier to create back in the day. Today, websites use challenge responses such as image verification or two-factor authentication to verify your legitimate identity.

But outlook.com is the most recent Microsoft web mail domain. Why is it already much more used than other Microsoft web mail domains (hotmail, live, etc.) ?

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The email properties they describe are simply a proxy for the age of account.

Fraud will be highly correlated with freshly created disposable email addresses, it would be rather unlikely that fraudsters would use a thousand accounts that have been active since 1999.

The shown webmail domains, and the numbers in account name simply are correlated with more recent accounts.

Go to hotmail.com and look at the login portal.

So what? The mail server name has practically nothing to do with the email address. The address is still @hotmail.com.

He makes a valid point: why did @outlook.com addresses suddenly become used for scamming?

Here's a possibility:

- - - - @outlook.com is a relatively new email domain (< 2 years)

- - - - Most people buying online are over age 18

- - - - Most people do not change their email address

- - - - Most people over the age of 18 have had their email address longer than two years

So, by that logic, if someone has a @outlook.com email address, there are a few possibilities:

- - - - They had an old email address, but switched/forwarded it to @outlook.com sometime in the last 2 years (unlikely - generally people don't suddenly change their email)

- - - - They made an @outlook.com address for ecommerce signups (unlikely - why not use your current provider e.g. Gmail?)

- - - - This is their first email account (unlikely)

- - - - They registered it to commit fraud (hmmmm)

Obviously this is all speculation and there are exceptions to all those assumptions, but it seems logical that the last option is more likely than the others, especially shen weighted by the fact that fraudsters almost always create more than one email account.

Honestly, it's even simpler than that: it's the default domain in the email address dropdown when you go to sign up for Outlook.com/Hotmail now. The fraudsters aren't bothering to change the value in the dropdown, and they tend to create new email accounts frequently, so you'll see whatever the current domain is overrepresented.

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