Fraud prevention startup Emailage raises USD 3.8 mln

Emailage uses e-mail addresses for user identity to help find potential fraud. The Emailage system is not an anti-spam platform, but rather it is an anti-fraud technology that can be leveraged by merchants and organizations to use email addresses to limit the risk of potentially fraudulent transactions.

The basic idea with Emailage is that an e-mail address can also be used to help verify that an individual transaction is legitimate, based on a number of different factors. The Emailage system can be used by both physical retailers as well as online ecommerce merchants.

E-mails are pervasive today and not considered a privacy risk in the same way that a Social Security number might be. With Emailage, instead of merchants needing to send multiple pieces of information about a customer, they need only to send the customers email in order to make the fraud decision.