Practical answers to the questions people ask after getting hit. Each one solves the problem properly — including the parts that need no LayerCall — and says plainly what the check will get wrong.
A practical guide to stopping fake and automated signups: what to check, in what order, and what each check costs you in real users. Includes copy-paste code.
Detect throwaway and temporary email providers at signup — how the lists work, why regex fails, and what a blocklist costs you in real customers.
How VPN and proxy detection actually works, why ASN lookups miss most consumer VPNs, and why detecting one should rarely mean blocking someone.
Stop repeat signups draining your free tier — what actually links one abuser's accounts together, and how to raise friction without punishing genuine new users.
The failure mode nobody measures: fraud checks that quietly reject genuine customers. How to add screening you can actually trust, and how to prove it is not costing you signups.
An agent arriving at your signup form on a real customer's behalf is not a crawler and not a bot to be blocked — it is a decision you have not made yet. Cryptographic agent identity via Web Bot Auth, the fetcher-versus-crawler distinction, and why detection is the wrong goal.
There is no universally correct cutoff. What decides it is the cost of each mistake in the specific flow you are protecting — here is how to work that out, what to measure first, and why the middle band matters more than the number.