

Ask HN: Service for detecting spam signups? - TimJRobinson

At our startup we&#x27;ve recently started seeing a surge in spam &#x2F; fraudulent users signing up to abuse the service. We have a captcha on our registration form but it isn&#x27;t enough.<p>I was wondering if there&#x27;s a service out there where you can submit someones username + some other details such as name, email etc and it would give a rating on how likely that signup is to be a spammer or a legitimate user.<p>Does something like this exist?<p>It&#x27;s fairly easy as a human to look at a new users details and determine whether they are likely to be a spammer or not (random character username &#x2F; email &#x2F; names or a bunch of accounts signed up in quick succession with similar details) but we don&#x27;t have the resources to do this and it would be great to have an automated way to do this.
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stevekemp
Off the top of my head I remember
[http://www.stopforumspam.com/](http://www.stopforumspam.com/) exists - which
is something I use n my on blogspam-detector
[http://blogspam.net/](http://blogspam.net/)

But I suspect that you'd be better placed to look at the patterns yourself, if
you were to setup some simple node.js/dancer/service to test an IP/email/name
combination and return a "yes/no" result you could then experiment with
different metrics.

One thing I do on my sites is block IPs. So if bogus-user-bob signs up from
1.2.3.4 then no other user will be permitted to sign up from that IP. I
realize that proxies will allow this to blacklist too many remote users, but
in practice I haven't had complaints.

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haidrali
I have used binary classifier to detect Ham and Spam emails i am pretty sure
we can apply some sort of classifier here as well i am not sure about the
exact parameters but if we have enough sample data we can surely write a
classifier for this problem as well. If you have sample data for spam signups
and regular signups tweet me at @alihaider907 can guide you in this regard

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gk1
One idea might be to use an API like Ark
([https://ark.com/](https://ark.com/)) or Clearbit
([https://clearbit.com/](https://clearbit.com/)) to see if the email has any
social accounts associated with it, and if it doesn't then label it as a high
likelihood of a fake signup.

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mtmail
Lots of our users use their business address (B2B service) and that wouldn't
work.

On the one hand I wish a service could filter mailinator, 10-minute-mail,
trash-mail addresses (each have hundreds of domain aliases), on the other hand
I'm using anonymous email myself sometimes so I'm glad it doesn't exist.

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iSloth
I'm aware of a load of hosting companies using the MaxMind service, you
basically push them a load of information for a transaction and they reply
with a risk rating.

I've use it in the past a few times and it was fairly accurate at capturing
the fraudulent traffic.

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mtmail
[https://akismet.com/](https://akismet.com/), known for identifying blog on
Wordpress blogs, has an API.

~~~
cfinke
Our API is entirely focused on identifying comment spam; we don't have
anything that would be useful for identifying spam signups.

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dangrossman
[https://www.maxmind.com/en/minfraud-
services](https://www.maxmind.com/en/minfraud-services)

