SE's 3 Member Special Task Force at Work

[KisaiTenshi]

There's a part in the credits that list "Special Task Force" followed by three names.


I speculate that only one member is active at any given time, with each having there own eight hour shift. In any case it's not enough and they need to do more. RMT Spam is making a mockery of the game.

I can probably answer this.

When you send a report, it doesn't land in the STF's inbox, it lands in a processing queue where GM's deal with the easy-to-ban RMT's, and the STF collages reports against the same player to open a case and collect evidence. That evidence is then used against future RMT's/cheats when they create/steal new accounts.

So they're probably not the ones that are banning the RMT spammers, they're the ones that are following the money.

At *placeIwillNotName*, there was a separate "bad people" and "bad items" department. I worked under the latter. You'd see the same stuff posted by the same chinese sellers, over and over and over and over, and they thought they were being clever. But I wrote a script that compared every listing they made character by character and that made the job so much easier. We weren't allowed to outright ban people unless they were selling counterfeits "again", everyone would claim innocent, and really, none of them are ever innocent.

But here's the thing you never realize. When I worked there, the department removes nearly 100% of the bad/counterfeit/fraudulent items before they even hit the public part of the site. The place I worked for invisibly delays items based on *not sharing* criteria so that almost none of it is ever able to hit the public part of the site. Despite brand names still sue the company but won't tell us how to ID anything, with good reason, they don't want to tell us how they know something is fake, so the counterfeiters can't "fix it" and try again.

So from SE's perspective, 3 people are probably enough, because one report might contain a dozen names, or a dozen reports might contain the same name. I'm sure they would hire more people if they didn't have a handle on the RMT traders. The spammers however are unlikely going to the STF, and are likely being banned by semi-automated tools that detect things like blacklisting and messaging rate.