Q: Should I use a shared industry blocklist or build my own private one?

Q: Should I use a shared industry blocklist or build my own private one?

A: Shared lists give you breadth, private lists give you precision — and leaning only on one leaves a real gap.

A shared blocklist (industry-wide feed of known-bad IPs, devices, and fraudulent affiliates) gives you fraud intelligence you could never gather alone — a farm caught elsewhere is blocked for you before it touches your traffic. The downsides: it lags (entries arrive after someone else got hit), it can carry false positives that punish recovered IPs, and everyone else has it too, so fraudsters test against public lists first.

A private blocklist captures your specific attackers and the patterns unique to your offers. Precise and current for your traffic, but narrow — you only know the fraud that already cost you.

How to combine them:
— Shared list as the wide first net for known industry-wide bad actors.
— Private list layered on top for your repeat offenders and offer-specific signatures.
— Age your private entries: an IP blocked six months ago may now be a clean reassigned residential address. Stale blocklists quietly kill good traffic.

Short version: shared lists for industry-wide breadth, private lists for your-specific precision — run both, and expire old private entries so they don't rot.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.