An application ecosystem may be open, allowing any party to develop and submit applications to the application ecosystem for distribution. Applications developers may have their developer accounts banned from submitting applications to the application ecosystem for a variety of reasons, such as the submission of applications containing viruses or malware, or applications that violate data gathering, advertising, hardware usage, or other policies of the application ecosystem. Because the application ecosystem is open, a developer who had their developer account banned from submitting applications may create a new developer account from which to submit applications.
Preventing developers whose developer accounts were banned from submitting applications using new developer accounts may be difficult. When the developer opens a new developer account, it may be unclear that the developer who opened the developer account is in fact the developer who had their previous developer account banned. Application level signals, such as an advertising identification given to the developer or a certificate used by the developer to sign applications, may be matched between applications that were submitted from a banned developer account and applications from a new developer account to help ascertain whether the same developer is responsible for both the banned and new developer account. However, these application signals may not help locate clusters of developer accounts that are related to one another despite belonging to multiple developers, which may occur when a developer uses multiple names to open developer accounts, and may not provide enough information for a person or automated system to be able to quickly decide whether to ban the new account.