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So they'll have a lead time building up a set of verified developers. These scams are pulled by organized crime syndicates, using human trafficking and beatings to keep their call centers manned with complicit workers.

Now they'll need to pay off a local mailman to give them all of Google's letters with an address in an area they control so they can register a town's worth of addresses, big whoop. It'll cost them a bit more than the registration fee, but I doubt it'll be enough to solve the problem.

by joshuamorton5 hours ago|

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> Now they'll need to pay off a local mailman to give them all of Google's letters with an address in an area they control so they can register a town's worth of addresses, big whoop. It'll cost them a bit more than the registration fee, but I doubt it'll be enough to solve the problem.

Yeah, this is a huge amount more work than, like, nothing.

by iamnothere4 hours ago|

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All it will do is create a new low risk black market job. Someone will manufacture and sell bulk identities like they do fake social accounts.

by joshuamorton3 hours ago|

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> Someone will manufacture and sell bulk identities

How? You've now moved the level of sophistication required from "someone runs some bots on the facebook website" to "someone is now committing complex fraud against a government".

If the only people who can run scams are state sponsored, that's still vastly better than the status quo.

by iamnothere3 hours ago|

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Amazon has a huge problem with packages being sent to fake people at different addresses. It’s part of review scams. This won’t be much different. Just send the verification to empty houses and apartments.

by joshuamorton3 hours ago|

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You now need to have a variety of fake addresses you can use, since scammed addresses will get banned. You also need fake IDs. So again, the bar has now been raised from "run a bot to make fake Facebook accounts" to "I have a large number of physical addresses and the ability to create arbitrary fake government IDs".

> Amazon has a huge problem with packages being sent to fake people at different addresses.

This usually involves those people getting weird packages and not doing anything with them, it doesn't require attacker-controlled addresses.

by iamnothere2 hours ago|

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I still think it’s doable. Fake IDs aren’t exactly hard to come by. You could also pay randos a $30 gift card to sign up for a developer account and share access. Enough people will do it. I guess this does raise the cost a little though.

by joshuamorton1 hours ago|

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> You could also pay randos a $30 gift card to sign up for a developer account and share access. Enough people will do it.

This could work, but the issue here is that a lot of these scams rely on the "zero cost"-ness of turnup and use that as a asymmetry. If it costs you nothing to turn up new scam-accounts, and it costs me something to investigate and remove them, you win. If it costs you $10 to create new scam accounts then as long as I can get the EV of a scam account below $10, the scam isn't worthwhile.