Payments

Where there is money, there is likely to be abuse.

Platforms that facilitate or enable the transfer of fungible value in any form, be it hard currency, cryptocurrency, stocks, or even in-game-items, are likely to have a wide swathe of potential abuses, but these generally fall into a few categories:

• Security: Attackers are trying to steal credentials, find security vulnerabilities, and otherwise assume system control that they shouldn't have access to.
• Illegal Payments: Facilitation of payments for real-world criminal or other unsavory business, like money laundering, sex trafficking, directing funds to listed entities, etc.
• Impersonation: users dissembling their identities to try to trick, coerce, or otherwise defraud one another.
• Scams: when peer to peer payments are possible, scams come with the territory, and are often challenging to distinguish from legitimate commerce via content alone.

Payments bring along with them a swathe of headaches for organizations that want to do them responsibly, which is why the primary two mechanisms that are used to handle payment infrastructure are various forms of Omission and Abdication: outsourcing this functionality to a third party, designing it out of the system entirely, or using systems like cryptocurrency that limit the platform's capacity to manage payments responsibly. This site (Focus on Features) tries instead to focus on mechanisms for changing the design of features on-platform, which is why these common strategies largely aren't listed.