Can leveraging data from email addresses bolster anti-fraud efforts?

Today, more companies are now leveraging data from email addresses in order to support their anti-fraud efforts. However, Clint Lowry, director of Global Product Management and Research at Accertify, insisted that enterprises should utilise data from a number of sources.

“There’s no silver bullet, but there are some best practices that can help you be more effective and efficient in preventing fraud,” Lowry stated in an Accertify whitepaper. An effective fraud prevention plan thus leverages data from "your company, the community of other companies attempting to prevent fraud, and third parties."

Three sources of data for fraud protection

"Before all else, merchants must learn to leverage their own internal data and experience," according to the report. This evidently requires internal communication, which can be particularly challenging when companies have multiple teams and departments.

As a result, many organisations implement various fraud solutions across different payment channels and lines of business. While employing a multitude of different models is effective, it also further complicates internal communications.

Fraudsters therefore "hop from one channel to another, finding the path of least resistance," in order to perpetrate fraud. Lowry added that sometimes cybercriminals execute fraud across a number of channels.

It is thus vital that companies develop a "means to communicate data internally" in an effective and timely manner. In order to address this, Accertify offers one solution that creates a central repository of data for an entire company.

Leveraging data from email addresses

Alongside internal data, companies are now leveraging data from email addresses in order to support their anti-fraud efforts. Indeed, "external data intelligence can help determine the risk of a transaction and lower the total cost of fraud by preventing fraudulent transactions and minimising false positives."

Partnered with Accertify, Emailage offers a global email fraud-risk assessment and scoring solution. In effect, Emailage assesses risk by utilising a patent-pending machine learning algorithm.

In turn, this predicts the likelihood of an email address belonging to a fraudster based on specific data patterns, user activity and probability. With a vast global data network, the solution provides an effective way to evaluate email-based risk.

Amador Testa, Chief Product Officer for Emailage, highlighted the importance of assessing risk based on an email address. “Despite the importance of an email address, little has been to assess the credibility of a person’s email address," Testa said.

“Scrutinising the email address gives a verification of the identity on a global scale," he added. As a result, this increases "customer satisfaction by eliminating the need to collect additional sensitive and private data."

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