This paper presents the first empirical study based on ground-truth data of a major Bullet-Proof Hosting (BPH) provider, a company called Maxided. BPH allows miscreants to host criminal activities in support of various cybercrime business models such as phishing, botnets, DDoS, spam, and counterfeit pharmaceutical websites. Maxided was legally taken down by law enforcement and its backend servers were seized. We analyze data extracted from its backend databases and connect it to various external data sources to characterize Maxided's business model, supply chain, customers and finances. We reason about what the ``inside'' view reveals about potential chokepoints for disrupting BPH providers. We demonstrate the BPH landscape to have further shifted from agile resellers towards marketplace platforms with an oversupply of resources originating from hundreds of legitimate upstream hosting providers. We find the BPH provider to have few choke points in the supply chain amendable to intervention, though profit margins are very slim, so even a marginal increase in operating costs might already have repercussions that render the business unsustainable. The other intervention option would be to take down the platform itself.

This paper presents a framework and tools to improve—by design—relationships between customers and large-scale service organisations. Up to now, several attempts have been made in both academia and practice to improve these relationships, but so far approaches such as relationship marketing and customer relationship management have failed to deliver on their theoretical promise. Several design studies and projects have pointed to more pragmatic new directions for improving relationships, albeit mostly in highly local settings and without as an extensive theoretical background. In this paper we revisit this issue from the perspective of large scale service organisations that seek to enjoy better relationships with their customers at a sustained and large scale. We propose that improved relationships be based on designing for ‘customer relationship experiences’ (CRX), in which both the customer and the organisation benefit, through mutual contributions that go beyond direct commercial exchange. To this purpose, the present paper provides a CRX framework and tools (with industry evaluation) that bring together the theory of marketing and practice of design literatures for assisting larger service organisations to design for relationships.