I’ve written about useless error messages before and how frustrating they are to anyone that isn’t a complete troglodyte. Depending on where this happens it can be more or less annoying, but what really takes the cake is when it happens for absolutely no good reason.
Nowadays almost all websites will require you to register or login almost the moment they have finished loading. Along with that the registration process for a lot of sites has become more and more complicated. There used to be a time when a username and a password was enough, but spammers, advertisers and data-hungry companies ruined that. Then everything started to require an email, which worked for a while until smartphones and temporary email came along. Now whenever you sign up anywhere there’s a good chance that it’ll require a phone number. I rarely put up with this shit and either decide to just not sign up or use a temporary phone number. The latter has also become increasingly hard to do as more and more privacy minded people are competing for a small pool of temporary phone numbers with spammers that also like to use these services.
I’ve made peace with the fact that using certain sites and services is just not possible anymore without handing them all your data and so when a sign-up fails with a useless error message along the lines of “suspicious or automated activity” I just admit defeat and move on. I’ll never know what part of the automated checks I failed that ultimately resulted in the registration to fail, but I usually also don’t care. If they think that this process is doing more good than harm, then so be it. Apparently it’s not deterring enough users, yet.
The problem is that this doesn’t just happen with burner accounts but it has also started to happen with actual legitimate accounts that I have tried to create. I recently tried to sign up for a cloud provider (It was Linode/Akamai) to rent a GPU for a project and despite me providing 100% correct information, including a correct address, full name, a valid phone number and bank details that match the name and address my account was awaiting approval after registration. I first thought that that’s just what they do with all new accounts and expected it to take at least one business day, but I actually got a response very quickly. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it was an automated response telling me that the account was denied activation for “activity or patterns associated with fraudulent behavior”. Whatever that means. I couldn’t even use their services so I don’t know what would constitute as “fraudulent” or “suspicious”. There’s no chance this decision was done manually so I’ll just blame whatever stupid system they use for detecting suspicious activity. The only potentially “suspicious” thing I could think of was using a VPN, but considering how much they’re being shilled on YouTube I’d assume that rejecting a customer based on just that would be a bad idea.
At this point one almost wishes for this to get so bad that at some point we’ll just be denied any and all digital services at which point the only thing left to do is build a shed in the woods and start sending out funny packages to certain people.