Wednesday, October 28th, 2026
Last weekend I was in Copenhagen - a really cool city! Lots of walking about sightseeing and eating pastries was achieved.
As such, not a whole lot of updates. One thing I have been working on the past couple of days though is a new fraud prevention system on PromptBase.
Running a marketplace is so much fun, and is a super durable and AI-proof business with real moats (perhaps I will write about this soon).
But, a massive downside is you are wholly responsible for ensuring no shady stuff goes on within your little marketplace economy.
I've dealt with:
just to name a few. Each time I have to drop everything I'm doing and build new defences.
It's partly scary and annoying, but also really satisfying in a weird way.
For a while now I've had a problem with something I've called "seller rings". This is where one or two people are operating multiple seller accounts on PromptBase.
Why is this bad? Well, the stuff they post is usually low-quality, but just passes our checks - and it drowns out genuine sellers who are making less frequent high-quality posts, which is much healthier for the platform. It's also against the site terms!
I'd added things in the past to try and prevent this - de-prioritizing posts, temporary bans, blocking entire countries - but still they get through.
The issue is these sellers are usually from countries where just one sale on PromptBase is huge relative to their local income - so they have a massive incentive to keep trying to create accounts and flood the market with low-quality supply.
A couple of months back using Zoneless, I discovered one guy who seemed to be going up to strangers (random old people in their village) and borrowing their IDs just so they could pass the ID and selfie checks!
This was pretty scary to discover - it looked like about 30 seller accounts had been created this way.
The new system I built unifies every bit of data known about a seller on PromptBase and looks for risks and seller rings. E.g. here it identified a ring of 6 sellers:
It's been really good so far - I've found 50+ suspicious accounts and been laying down the ban hammer.
Keeping a digital marketplace healthy and high quality in this AI age is really hard, but so important I think, otherwise they die a slow AI-slop rot induced death.
