Which emerging technologies are being employed to develop anti-fraud solutions that safeguard online marketplaces and platforms?
At Incognia, we’re pioneering the next generation identity signal to address risk, fraud, and abuse in online marketplaces. Our technology ends the balancing act between fraud prevention and user experience, enhancing both simultaneously by leveraging modern device fingerprinting and advanced location identity backed by tamper-detection capabilities. With Incognia, marketplaces can give legitimate users a frictionless experience while ensuring that fraudsters are blocked. Our solution integrates three layers to deliver stronger risk signals while enabling user verification and account security for trusted customers.
Device intelligence: we create strong device IDs for mobile and web, providing a reliable foundation for re-recognising devices across sessions. This is crucial for maintaining the integrity of user accounts and preventing fraudulent activities.
Tamper detection: we identify and prevent device integrity issues with spoofing and tampering detections in every API response. Our system detects location tampering (e.g., GPS spoofing and VPN usage), device tampering (including emulators, bots, root/jailbreak), and app tampering. This ensures that any attempts to bypass security measures are identified and mitigated.
Location intelligence: our capabilities include listing verification, maintaining a trusted location database, monitoring a suspicious location watchlist, and linking location data to device resets. These measures provide a powerful context for user identity and activity, enabling marketplaces to detect suspicious patterns and prevent fraudulent transactions.
How does location verification tech prevent multi-accounting and listing scams, and what are its benefits when compared to other fraud prevention methods?
This technology is a powerful tool for preventing multi-accounting and listing scams, offering unique advantages over traditional fraud prevention methods. Incognia leverages location verification and device identification to enhance security and improve user experience.
Preventing multi-accounting: fraudsters often create multiple accounts to evade detection and continue their scams. Incognia’s first layer of defence against this behaviour is device intelligence, which identifies when multiple accounts are being created on the same device. However, fraudsters don’t give up easily. Using app cloning tools or factory resetting their devices, they attempt to bypass device-based security measures. Incognia addresses this challenge with advanced tamper detection and device reset behaviour monitoring, making it harder for banned users to rejoin with a new account from the same device.
Preventing listing scams: listing scams involve fraudsters posting fake listings to deceive users. For marketplaces selling goods, Incognia’s device intelligence helps detect suspicious user behaviour and ban fraudulent users more permanently. For vacation rental marketplaces, Incognia’s tamper-resistant location verification helps verify listings with minimal friction and false positives.
There are additional advantages over other methods.
Enhanced onboarding verification: while Incognia doesn’t verify documents, our location intelligence can verify a user’s presence at a specific location, allowing platforms to authenticate users based on physical location and reducing the need for more intrusive verification methods.
Persistent device defence: unlike traditional device fingerprinting solutions, Incognia can block devices even after a factory reset. This defence can help marketplaces prevent repeated abuse from sophisticated fraudsters.
Holistic fraud detection: Incognia’s technology integrates location intelligence with device and behavioural analytics, offering a multi-layered approach which is difficult for fraudsters to circumvent.
Reduced false positives: incorporating precise location data helps us to reduce false positives. Legitimate users are more easily distinguished from fraudsters, leading to an optimised user experience and fewer unnecessary disruptions.
Enhanced user experience: our location verification and device intelligence systems operate in the background, providing strong security without adding friction to the user journey, ensuring that good users access and use the platform effortlessly, and bad actors are filtered out.
Which specific strategies can be implemented by online marketplaces to reduce fraud in 2024 and beyond?
Our Device Identity Frontline Report outlines several strategies to combat fraud effectively. One key strategy is to put device and location signals at the forefront of risk and authentication flows. Device integrity checks and location verification are ways to filter out bad actors early in the user journey. It’s also critical for businesses to ensure that their risk-decisioning signals are trustworthy. Fraudsters constantly evolve their techniques, tampering with devices, apps, locations, and browsers. It’s important to detect advanced fraudster techniques to ensure accurate data-guiding decisions.
Generating good friction is another critical strategy. While reducing friction is often the goal, the right friction methods challenge fraudsters while minimising the negative impact on legitimate users. Our data shows that 85% of users are willing to share their location when it’s used for fraud prevention and security, highlighting the potential of this approach.
This editorial piece was first published in The Paypers' Fintech for Marketplaces and Platforms Report 2024 which taps into the fast, ever-expanding ecommerce industry, being the ultimate source of information for businesses looking to expand and grow their consumer base.
About Incognia
Incognia is a next-generation identity solution that combines modern device fingerprinting and location intelligence to solve complex fraud, risk, and abuse problems for delivery, ride-hailing, marketplace, and financial services platforms.
Incognia’s signal, backed by advanced tamper detection, enables frictionless and persistent user verification, device recognition, and fraud prevention.
Leveraging over a decade of team expertise, it delivers customisable risk analysis and actionable insights that empower businesses to protect users and build trust.
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