Skip to content

Stop using manual internet searches to conduct fraud reviews!



Join our mailing list

Signifyd regularly publishes free reports packed with business insights, commerce trends and data from our massive Commerce Network. We’ll only email when we have something meaningful to share, no more than once per week. And of course you can unsubscribe any time.

The setup for a fictional manual review of a suspicious order

The ability to quickly search a customer on the web to discover their identity and connection to a purchase they may or may not have made on your website has led to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, Whitepages and other sites becoming de facto fraud prevention tools. But the means of conducting a proper search is all but an art and lack of a repeatable science in fraud departments across corporate America.

For example purposes, let’s examine a fictional purchase and subsequent manual review that is indicative of how companies review questionable orders all across the country regardless of company size. ‘Joe Smith’ is a 21 year old college student from Oregon travelling to his spring break in Florida, purchasing a high end good on the web to be delivered to his friend’s vacation house in Orlando. Joe is ordering from a hotel room in New Mexico as he and his friend travel across the country on their way to his friend’s vacation house in Florida.

What information is currently available to someone to review this order?

Let’s examine what would be available to someone reviewing this order short of calling Joe directly to ask him about this purchase.

  • The IP address is from a separate state from where Joe lives.
  • The shipping address is from a separate state where Joe lives and has no family connection.
  • It’s an expensive order, which in most cases would automatically trigger a review.

So what would a typical agent do in this situation? They might go onto Facebook and see that Joe attends Oregon State. They might go onto Whitepages.com and see that he lives with his parents in Corvallis and commutes to school, and that his mobile area code is in Oregon. If they do a Google search of Joe, perhaps they might find some information on where he went to high school or pull up another relative of the same family name who works in the area. But in a quick concise manner that can be repeated across multiple orders, how can someone reviewing this purchase find a connection to Joe and his friend?

Signifyd provides the information to validate this order.

Signifyd utilizes social networks, unstructured data from Google searches, public records, mapping data, IP Geolocation information and more to draw connections between data points to help paint a clear picture of every order. Some data points Signifyd could provide someone to review this order are:

  • Joe and his friend are ‘friends’, and they attend the same university.
  • Joe’s friend has family in Orlando, and Joe mentions on a Social Network that he is staying in Orlando.
  • The email address used in the purchase is an .edu address from Oregon State, and has been in use for over 4 years.
  • Joe has shipped to this address previously from a separate merchant, which we verify in our cross merchant records.

In as quickly as 120 milliseconds, Signifyd can provide you a score on this transaction as well as an analysis of why you should be accepting or declining an order. While the most experienced members of a fraud prevention team might be able to piece the information above from multiple internet searches, even the most veteran member would not be able to beat our instant analysis. We would love to speak to you and your team on how your company conducts fraud reviews currently to see where Signifyd could add value and boost revenues from utilizing Signifyd’s services. Contact us at [email protected]

Signifyd

Signifyd

Signifyd, the leading commerce protection provider to Digital Commerce 360's top 1,000 merchants, provides an end-to-end Commerce Protection Platform that leverages its Commerce Network to maximize conversion, automate customer experience and eliminate fraud and customer abuse for retailers.