1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to account maintenance, and, more particularly, to identifying, scoring, and terminating duplicate accounts.
2. Description of Related Art
Customers of a company may attempt to open multiple accounts for a variety of reasons. For example, customers may open multiple accounts for personal bookkeeping reasons, because they forgot about an existing account, for an improper purpose (e.g., violating a company policy), etc. One example of using multiple accounts for an improper purpose may be using automated means (e.g. bots) to register for multiple email accounts for the transmission of “spam.” Spam may include electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings (e.g., generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup). In addition to wasting the recipient's time with unwanted email, spam also consumes network bandwidth.
Another example of using multiple accounts for an improper purpose may be penny stock scams. For example, in the most common penny stock scheme (e.g., the pump and dump), a small group of speculators will accumulate a large number of shares in a penny stock. Once their positions are in place, they will release positive financial information (e.g., through spam) that may drastically affect people's perception of the stock. The intent is to get small time investors to start trading irrationally. The news is almost always false, but before this is discovered, the price of the stock often skyrockets and the original speculators exit with large profits.