alt Hacker NewsWhat I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion. For most online services, your account can be in one of two states: Totally good and "banned for life". There's no warning, no investigative period, no concept of scale (was the fraud $10 or $10,000?), no way to serve your time and come back if you actually were bad. It's just instant, silent BAN HAMMER.
Replies
>What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion.
Because anything else would require them to spend resources to examine your case and claims more deeply (to find the appropriate level of response), and they don't want to spend them, plus they don't care.
At the scale these companies operate and the number of actual scammers they block because of their 0 - 100 policies, I can see how they got there. I bet all of us have had the luck (?) of out card being blocked because someone out there was able to get a hold of the credentials. Collateral damage like this, as devastating as it is to the individual, is probably a drop in the bucket for the company.
I'm not excusing this. What happened here shouldn't happen, and there should be quick resolutions and explanations available to the aggrieved parties.
When money is concerned, any kind of suspected money laundering / fraud investigation generally requires you to pause that account until the check is complete. What happens afterwards will be down to the results of the investigation.
It's also unlikely there are just those two states. For many services there will be a number of factors involved, but it's purposely opaque to make it harder to circumvent.
The same with Youtube. Broken an unknown rule on one of your vids? Your whole account and all the videos are deleted instantly.
Because it's easier for the companies and there is no (serious enough) downside to doing it this way.
As someone who worked in fraud, sometimes the $10 transaction is primer for 10k transaction that will really cost the company. When you don't know what's going on, you don't give a shit about end user and primary objective is prevent the company from losing money, shut it down and sort it out is easiest way.
Furthermore, without physical presence where you could sit down with someone, this becomes more difficult to deal with. Truth is, Apple should have option where someone could go to Apple Store, verify ID and talk to someone with power but they don't want to spend that money so here we are.