Why is registration the best place to stop marketplace abuse?

Bulk account creation is the precondition for nearly every downstream marketplace abuse — fake sellers, fake reviews, promo farming, listing spam. Registration is the cheapest point to intervene because it precedes all of it: stopping a fake account before it exists is far cheaper than detecting and removing its output later.

Should signup fraud prevention block signups outright?

The category should drive the response, not a binary allow/deny. A datacenter origin at signup justifies hard friction such as CAPTCHA or a delay. A residential proxy justifies phone verification. Abuse-list membership or bot detection justifies manual review. Blocking every signup with any risk signal at all will reject genuine users on shared or previously-flagged connections.

How does this differ from CAPTCHA alone?

CAPTCHA verifies that a request is likely automated, but sophisticated abuse increasingly uses CAPTCHA-solving services and doesn't rely on obviously scripted behaviour. IP category adds an independent signal — is this a datacenter, a residential proxy, an address already on an abuse list — that isn't defeated by solving a CAPTCHA, and lets you apply proportionate friction instead of the same challenge to every signup.

Does this add latency to the signup flow?

A single real-time API call at registration typically returns in well under a second, which fits comfortably inside a signup flow's existing validation step without a noticeable delay to the user.

Use case · Ecommerce and marketplaces

Signup & Registration Fraud Prevention

Bulk account creation is the precondition for nearly every downstream marketplace abuse — fake sellers, fake reviews, promo farming, listing spam. Registration is the cheapest place to intervene, because it precedes all of it.

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Why registration is the cheapest point to intervene

Quick answer

Signup fraud prevention calls an API at registration and uses the IP's risk category — not a binary allow/deny — to decide the friction level: hard verification for datacenter origins, phone verification for residential proxies, manual review for known bots or abuse-list members.

Every fake seller account, every fabricated review, every promo-code farm and every spam listing starts the same way: a registration that should never have succeeded. Catching it at signup means the fraud never generates any downstream cost — no fraudulent listing to take down later, no fake review to detect and remove, no promo abuse to claw back.

The failure mode to avoid is treating every risk signal the same way. A blanket block on any flagged IP will also reject real users on shared university networks, corporate VPNs, or mobile carriers that share address space with less trustworthy traffic.

How IP Raccoon helps

A single API call at the moment of registration returns the categories the address is flagged in, and the detection behind each one. The response is yours to act on — the friction column below is policy you set, not a verdict the API hands down:

Category	Suggested friction
Datacenter origin	Hard friction — CAPTCHA, delay, or block
Residential proxy	Phone verification
Abuse-list membership or bot	Manual review
Clean residential / mobile	No added friction

This keeps the experience frictionless for the vast majority of genuine signups while adding proportionate resistance exactly where the risk actually is.

What to look for in a signup fraud API

Graduated response categories, not a single risk score with one threshold
Fast enough to sit inside the signup form's existing validation without adding noticeable delay
Coverage of residential proxies specifically — the infrastructure built to look like normal home connections
Clear evidence per verdict, so support teams can explain a block or a step-up to a genuine user who got flagged

$ curl 'https://api.ipraccoon.com/ip/203.0.113.88' \
  -H "Authorization: $IP_RACCOON_TOKEN"

{
  "ip": "203.0.113.88",
  "risks": {
    "anonymizers": "datacenter"
  }
}

Stop fake accounts before they exist

Add IP Raccoon to your registration flow and see the real share of signups coming from datacenters and proxy networks.

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