Feeling a bit bad honestly. I released my first Add-on in the Chrome Webstore (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sheet-gurus-sms-send-text/caifjmaanhnclfninjjfhbmigekmkeeh?hl=en) and imagine my delight when I got my first 3 customers in the first 48 hours with 0 marketing!
Unfortunately, these ended up being scammers. I reviewed the messages being sent out and the first batch of 50 were sent to incremental phone numbers from some guy pretending to be Verizon and saying people owed money.
I then banned that account and he made another. So I setup a rule on the server that so far has worked in his next few attempts at making accounts.
Then just tonight I see another new user has texted 30 people, mostly deactivated phone numbers, sending some scam bitly link.
So I'm now having to spend more time and money, and embarrassment, sending followup texts to all of the recipients of these people telling them of the mistake.
I also am expecting chargebacks on all 7 of these transactions on Stripe, which will take my grand total revenue for this project to -$105!
Anyone else deal with scammers or people using their SaaS for illicit purposes? Advice? I suppose a good first step for me would be to enable SMS authentication on new accounts; I just hate adding more roadblocks for legitimate customers to get started.
I've had this concern about my product (https://notifycore.com/) because it has the capability to send out SMS messages. My price point builds in a little bit of natural protection, but I have a free trial which can be exploited.
One thing I have in place is some alerting that lets me know when an account sends out a high number of notifications in a given time period. It's there as much for fraud as it is to make sure I work with customers who are nearing their limits. To be honest, I haven't run into a case where anyone has hit near that threshold so I don't know yet if it's the right approach. Still, I'd rather deal with a few false alarms then let it go for too long.
Yeah I'm in the middle of implementing a similar system. It sucks to have spend this time trying to defend against malicious users instead of improving the core app for real customers, but it is what it is I suppose.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
All excellent ideas, thank you for your suggestions.