😂 Protonmail accounts get created all the time sure but how many happen to claim coinpot too?
Is that your argument? That there are 0 people who use Protonmail and are not scammers? My point was scammers are creating Coinpot accounts all the time because they don't care if some get banned. They can make 100 more. We don't even know if they only do this to Protonmail accounts.
You are only looking at part of what they said. They said there were a huge number of Protonmail accounts all signed up on the same day from the same IP range. It doesn't matter if was a different email service. They are just stating 3 common factors of a large number of accounts that far beyond coincidence and it is obvious abuse.
He said one sentence, and I quoted all of it. It is obvious that someone is abusing the system. My point is that IP addresses can be shared by a massive number of people, as can email provider. So you make an account, and at the same time someone else is creating a bunch of fake accounts (and there's probably never a time when someone isn't making a bunch of fake accounts). And bam, now your account is yet another one created by the scammer, and you have no way to prove otherwise.
Regardless of whether you think that I personally am lying, this type of fraud detection is fairly likely to create false positives at some point or another. When that happens, you're automatically a scammer and any attempt to defend yourself is proof of your guilt (this is known as a kafka trap).
i think you are massively missing the point here
its not that you use protonmail - of course this is a fairly common email provider
its not that you use a particular ip address - of course they can be shared, especially ip ranges
and its not about the date that you make an account
its the very unlikely combination of all 3.
its very, very unlikely that you would have by coincidence created a protonmail account on the same day that a bot created loads of other protonmail accounts from within the same ip range
i mean, its possible - but massively unlikely - even though the 3 individual parts (date/ip/email) are each plausible
and we dont know from what that email says, perhaps they have additional information too
I'm aware of the point. My point is that their point is wrong. People are bad at statistics. They'll play a game like XCOM where they have a 5% chance of failure when taking an action, then get mad when the 5% happens because they mentally shortcut 95% to 100%.
Here's a follow-up email: https://imgur.com/a/I8vmwwW
Coinpot says they typically get 3-4 Protonmail accounts a day. On the day my account got created, 3200 got created. So ~3-4 of those accounts are probably legit. A single IP address can represent anywhere from 1 to millions of people. He was looking at an IP range, not a single one, so multiply that by however many individual addresses.
The odds can therefore be stated as, "For each of those 3-4 legit accounts, choose let's say 10 million random people. What are the odds that there is at least 1 Coinpot scammer within those 10 million?" Not that bad, actually. That's 10 million rolls of the dice! It's at least not outside the range of possibility.
Let's also not forget that scammers are not an isolated incident. This whole thing may have played out in similar fashion at other times, with the same or other email providers.
People have this inbuilt trust in authority. Coinpot didn't take *their* money, so Coinpot must be competent and trustworthy and anyone who says otherwise must be a liar. I know that I didn't create 3200 accounts, so I necessarily have to start with the conclusion that Coinpot is either mistaken or lying. I assume mistakes before malevolence, so the simplest solution is that the unlikely HAS happened.
you are still missing the point
this isnt a computer game with a simple 5% probability
it is the combination of at least 3 different factors (date/ip/email) that makes this extremely improbable
im not for 1 minute saying you a cheater/fraud (i dont know any more than you do) or accusing you of anything sinister
but even with your wonky math above the chances are at least 1 in a 1000 or more like 1 in a million that this could happen
so they should check each of those 3200 accounts manually to see if each is possibly (1 in a million chance) a genuine account?
A. Date can be removed from the equation. Every day, someone is signing up for a Coinpot account, and probably every day someone is trying to scam Coinpot. The odds of *someone* signing up on the same day with the same email provider as a scammer is basically 100%.
B They don't have to check 3200 accounts. They literally have an email address for support. They only have to check the accounts of the people that email them. I have, and the response is, "Well the timing is suspicious, and suspicious is good enough for us." It's literally impossible to prove I didn't do it, so I'm reliant on them unless I want to sue them. And even if I wanted to sue them, I lost about $450, which would likely cost me that much to recover even if it were a sure bet.
C. Since then, I've seen another person on reddit claiming to have gotten the exact same line about someone in their IP range making accounts with Protonmail emails on the same day. I admit I'm biased to believe them due to my situation. Given that and other people with Protonmail accounts claiming to be banned, I suspect either their IP range is wide or they're overplaying their hand on how precise their anti-fraud is. At worst, people should remember that while scammers have an incentive to claim innocence, Coinpot also has an incentive to claim guilt since they keep the money. And it's not like they have to preserve their business reputation.
