Self-initiated case study · Product Manager · Social Platform / Trust & Safety
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Trust & Safety | Fraud Prevention | Retention | Platform Health
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Discord grew from 56M to 150M users between 2019 and 2022 — but that explosive growth came with a cost. Scammers flooded the platform, and growth slowed dramatically, from 50%+ annually to just 6% between 2021 and 2022. The platform's simple onboarding (email only) made it trivially easy for bots and fraudsters to create accounts at scale.
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In Q1 2022 alone, Discord disabled 26M accounts for spam or scam offenses — a 31% increase from the previous quarter. By Q2, another 27.7M accounts were removed. The CEO publicly acknowledged scams as a critical threat to the platform's future.
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🎮 Fake downloads & games Malware-laden files sent from compromised accounts
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🎁 Fake giveaways & NFT drops Phishing links disguised as reward claims
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🎭 Discord impersonation Hackers posing as official Discord accounts
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💎 Free Nitro scams Fake subscription giveaways to harvest credentials
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Focused on 14–32 year olds — 65% of Discord's user base — segmented into gamers, Web3 community members, and moderators. Key insight: younger users were most vulnerable due to low awareness of social engineering tactics, while moderators were targets due to their visibility and trust.
Top pain points prioritized by reach and impact:
I mapped 7 solutions and used a RICE framework to prioritize. Key insight from the analysis: solving fraud and DM overload simultaneously would also resolve the trust problem — making it a 2-for-1 strategic bet. I ruled out high-effort, low-confidence solutions like full AI/ML scam detection upgrades in favour of targeted identity verification.