Closing the fraud prevention time gap
By André Ferraz, CEO and Co-Founder at Incognia
What’s the “time gap” in the world of fraud prevention?
It’s the time between the emergence of a new threat and the platform finding a way to counter it.
The wider that gap, the bigger the window for bad actors to commit fraud unhindered before you can crack down.
This gap is hard to decrease. Fraud prevention teams have many speed bumps that fraudsters don’t have.
You have to research new solutions, talk to vendors, get legal approval, test new software, negotiate contracts, conduct implementations, and much more.
But fraudsters don’t have all that red tape to worry about. Once they identify a vulnerability, they just get right to work stealing from your platform.
So how can you close this time gap and respond to new threats faster?
Here are three ways:
1. Optimize speed-to-test at your organization
Testing out new solutions and policies is critical but time-consuming, so focus on making that process as efficient as possible. Get familiar with the internal procedures you need to follow so you can move through them quickly. Equip your team with clearly defined steps for testing and implementation. This could save you weeks of fraudster free-for-all time.
2. Attack the roots of your fraud problems, not only the branches
Look for solutions that target the source of your fraud problems. For example, multi-accounting and ban evasion are foundational fraud techniques (roots) that enable many different types of fraud, like promotion abuse, refund abuse, or chargebacks (branches). Fraudsters rely on these techniques in order to continue the fraud consistently and scale their operation. So rather than only chopping away at the branches, focus on stopping fraud at the roots.
3. Use internal intelligence to your advantage
The longer your platform is in the dark about a new vulnerability or fraud scheme, the longer it can be exploited at will. Keeping an ear to the ground within your own organization can help you identify new fraud problems more quickly. For example, is the customer support team seeing certain patterns of refund requests outside the norm? Or are they getting complaints about the same types of issues over and over? Is the marketing team seeing unusually low retention after the latest promotional campaign? Collaborating and sharing intel across departments can help you catch emerging threats faster.
Fraudsters have certain speed advantages over fraud fighters, but there are still ways you can shrink the fraud prevention time gap.
And any reduction you make in that gap could be a difference-maker the next time a new threat emerges for your platform.
Watch Incognia’s recent webinar that goes deeper into this topic:
Fraud Prevention: Cost Center of Profit Center?