Fight fraud frugally

Quick question if Sift is hanging out in these threads: Why would you use $val arguments in your JSON API? It seems like nearly any other symbol would have been a better choice, since PHP, Ruby, Perl and others use $ in string interpolation.<p>Yes, developers should be smarter about escaping and using string values, but this seems like a very easy thing to get wrong.

Makes perfect sense for a couple reasons.<p>Machine learning based anti-fraud systems perform asymptotically better as you get more variety and volume of data, and Sift can market it as such (&quot;our network consists of over X merchants&quot;). The 100 dollars of free service they are giving away is likely worth more to them in the data alone. The biggest credit card fraud solution I know of markets itself as a better solution because of its &quot;consortium&quot; of thousands of card issuers: <a href="http://brblog.typepad.com/files/falcon_scoring_srvr_2519ms.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brblog.typepad.com&#x2F;files&#x2F;falcon_scoring_srvr_2519ms.p...</a><p>This arrangement also lets Sift very naturally eases merchants into being paying customers as they grow.

I especially like the idea of watching the visitor&#x27;s pageviews across the entire site for clues to sketchy behavior. Is that a common feature of anti-fraud systems, or something unique to Sift Science?<p>... and is that pageview information predictive, so far?

I think it&#x27;s an open question if there will be enough online merchants that aren&#x27;t {amazon, newegg, zappos} -- assuming that zappos has access to amazon anti-fraud tech -- to build a business on. They&#x27;re not the only ones gambling there will be a large ecommerce ecosystem, but prime in particular has moved my online purchasing nearly exclusively to amazon.

Doesn&#x27;t a user that has Ghostery&#x2F;NoScript render this completely useless?

This is spam. Their product isn&#x27;t innovative or even interesting. They&#x27;re not doing anything new. Google Analytics and Microsoft&#x27;s AdCenter give merchants the same information.