Financial institutions like banks and credit card issuers have often been thought of as the traditional target for fraudsters. When it comes to fraud and profits, attacking a bank or a card issuer is akin to going straight to the source for seasoned criminals. This is because successfully obtaining a credit card with a stolen identity or accessing someone’s bank account for a transfer allows criminals to spend that money in brick and mortar stores. However, as more transactions go digital, smaller banks, lenders, and merchants have become increasingly affected by online fraud.
As an online money transfer platform, OFX offers competitive exchange rates in over 50 currencies. They serve a globally oriented society, and their diverse client base includes expatriates, property investors, international students, small businesses and large corporations. The very features that made them convenient and appealing to consumers also made them the target of sophisticated fraudsters and automated attacks.
The problem: keyboard mashing and fake identities
OFX noticed an unusual influx of new accounts being created using the names of people that didn’t exist. In further investigating these sudden new accounts they found that they were all created around the same time, indicating possible bot activity.
At this point, OFX reached out to Emailage for further help. Using Emailage’s risk assessment, OFX noticed correlations between the non-existence of the email address, and whether names matched the verified IDs. There were too many anomalies, some names were clearly created by mashing keyboard keys and were not real names. Some names appeared to be very real but did not match a verified ID. With the help of Emailage’s behavioural biometric analysis, OFX determined these cases of attempted synthetic ID fraud.
Putting an end to this fraud attack and looking to the futureAfter discovering that they were falling prey to attempted synthetic ID fraud, OFX worked with the decision and fraud scientists at Emailage to develop custom rules based on factors like name composition, email address and verified ID to automatically deactivate these accounts en masse. This saved time for the manual review teams and increased productivity across the board.
OFX didn’t stop there though. They continue to work with Emailage to detect and stop new fraud attacks, staying ahead of fraud trends. OFX utilizes Emailage via API on every new account registration and whenever pertinent account details change. The OFX team uses Emailage to re-verify the changed information, which limits the amount of friction experienced by legitimate customers and stops would-be fraudsters from gaining control over accounts.
The OFX team has found Emailage Fraud Warnings particularly useful because of their customizable settings. The OFX team employs these customizations to obtain additional intelligence, including which region fraudulent events occurred and the alleged reasons. These warnings along with other shared network intelligence gathered by Emailage across multiple industries in every region of the globe allow the OFX fraud team to spend their time more efficiently.
“As fraudsters become more sophisticated, we have upped our ability to identify any potential threats. By combining advanced technology with a competent team of fraud prevention professionals, we’ve been able to pick up more and more cases of ID theft,” says Jason Nader, Head of Fraud Risk Management at OFX.
In conclusion
OFX takes compliance and security very seriously, so global fraud coverage is very important to the team. As the company has offices in seven locations and customers all over the world, analysis by the OFX team has shown that the different geographical regions they operate in face different fraud threats. By implementing an API integration with Emailage, OFX has been able to increase approvals, stop multiple fraud attacks, and significantly reduce customer friction for new and existing customers.
About Emailage
Emailage, founded in 2012 and with offices across the globe, is a leader in helping companies significantly reduce online fraud. Through key partnerships, proprietary data, and machine-learning technology, Emailage builds a multi-dimensional profile associated with a customer’s email address and renders a predictive risk score. Customers realize significant savings from identifying and stopping fraudulent transactions.
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