Who Are the Abusers?

If you have not managed a publicly available application or service that is subject to such abuse, you may be wondering just who these problem users are. The full spectrum of abusers can, we believe, be grouped into three categories, based on their motives for acting against the generally accepted norms of online behavior.

Spammers

To date, the most prominent form of identity abuse has come from users trying to market a product or service, or trying to increase their sites' search engine rankings by sowing links on other sites. The activities of a spammer might include the following:

• Posting advertisements
• Posting bogus product reviews or other commercial spin for their own products or against a competitor
• Starting pyramid schemes
• Selling gray market products such as pharmaceuticals, software, or adult services

The primary motive of spammers is commercial, and so it is relatively easy to prevent them by charging a modest fee for access to the system. Once the fee for access begins to cut into the expected return from posting advertisements on your system, spammers will either move on or apply to become legitimate advertisers on your site.

Scammers

The anonymity of online services is attractive to those who fancy being able to get away with something that is illegal or immoral. Scammers use your application to do things that they wouldn't do on their own servers, hoping that you rather than they will be the target of any legal actions. Here are some examples of this kind of behavior:

• Posting malicious code that installs a botnet node or keylogger on a visitor's computer (drive-by download or similar)
• Posting the forms used in phishing scams
• Posting any sort of large or popular file to avoid having to pay bandwidth fees
• Posting pornographic material to avoid laws forbidding such posting
• Posting copyrighted material such as music or software to avoid intellectual property laws
• Conning other users into donating money to bogus causes
• Soliciting other potential spammers or scammers

Scammers often have a strong financial incentive for doing what they do, so the adoption of a registration fee may have little effect. You may think that payment of such a fee could be used to trace a scammer's real identity, but it is likely that anyone attempting to pull off a serious con or crime will have access to stolen credit cards or funding sources.

On the other hand, since a scammer's primary motivation is to avoid being caught, the threat of surveillance or an in-depth investigation into suspicious registration requests can be a strong deterrent.

Griefers and Trolls

Seemingly worse than spammers and scammers, because of the psychological effect they have on other users of an application, are people who enjoy annoying or harassing others. So-called trolls attempt to catch the attention of other users by posting obviously erroneous or inflammatory messages. Griefers attempt to disrupt an online community through psychological abuse and off-color postings. Here are just a few of the tactics used by these individuals:

• Posting insults or profanity
• Posting slanderous or defamatory material
• Posting objectionable or inappropriate content, such as hate speech or disturbing images
• Habitually flaming other users (escalating arguments)
• Decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio with off-topic posts
• Bullying other members

Because they thrive on attention, attempting to stop trolls from abusing an application can start a vicious circle of increased abuse. The best strategy for making a troll go away is to ignore him. Therein lies a dilemma, and a sometimes delicate situation: how do you prevent a determined creep from annoying your users, without just egging him on? A satisfied troll will always find a more clever way of annoying you.

The problem is compounded by the fact that in all but the most extreme cases, trolls are doing nothing illegal. Imagine going to the police with your tales of posted profanity and abuse; they are likely to shrug their shoulders at your dilemma. The aim of trolls and griefers is, in fact, to attract other users' attention onto themselves, without upsetting anyone to the point of taking real-world action.