alt Hacker NewsLook, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so.
What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.
It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.
It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).
There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.
[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.
[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
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This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.
> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc.
At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated power: fat chance.
I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past.
The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.
This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.
Well, more tyranny than we already live under.
But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".
> beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
It suggests nothing of the sort, and in fact explicitly attempts to establish that none of this is intrinsic to any affinity group. The point isn't that the fraudsters in this case were of a particular ethnicity; it's that they shared an ethnicity, which enables the kind of internal social trust that fraud rings require.
Further, it suggests many clear heuristics that are nothing to do with ethnicity. The suggestions are clear and explicit; they just happen to involve occasionally denying services without proof of already-committed fraud, which you apparently consider unacceptable. But here is an experienced person telling you from expertise, with abundant citations and evidence, that nothing else really works, and furthermore that this is common knowledge in a well established industry specifically devoted to the problem.