Member Article

Fraud-fighting pioneers SEON improves fraud detection and reduces false positives for thousands of companies with tech enhanced capabilities

SEON, the fraud fighters, is strengthening its mission to eradicate online fraud as it today updated its fraud detection solution with new capabilities that will increase its ability to detect fraud while decreasing false positives from legitimate customers. The new update is based on careful analysis by SEON’s data science team. The in-house fraud experts found patterns that point to specific settings being used for fraud attempts, and by flagging these settings have improved SEON’s accuracy with risk scores.

Fraud is continually evolving, and with fraudsters becoming increasingly professional and creating their own ‘fraud as a service’ software that anyone can use, it is more important than ever that anti-fraud companies like SEON are able to discover patterns in the data that is generated from the millions of transactions that pass through the company’s AI-enabled tools.

SEON’s solution was already able to create risk profiles from 500 different parameters, and this update significantly increases its capabilities, preventing more fraud attempts before they happen and decreasing the likelihood that legitimate transactions are flagged as fraud. Device fingerprinting is a powerful tool when countering fraud, as fraudsters will rarely if ever use ‘normal’ setups - they will want to both hide their identity and have automated systems carry out multiple fraud attempts at once, so they won’t access the sites they target through a standard device, browsing environment or web browser. They also tend to use proxies or VPNs.

By detecting unusual setups, SEON is able to give more precise risk scores to each customer or transaction. The results will be shared in an open way with users so that they will know exactly what has caused a rejection and can update their custom rules to best suit the unique challenges of their industry.

SEON’s fraud detection solution also detects burner phones, virtual numbers, disposable phone numbers and identifies even more carriers and networks to prevent false positives. It is almost trivially easy to generate a realistic-looking phone number - there are sites that will allow you to do so that can be found through a Google search rather than the depths of the dark web, and temporary phone numbers are also available. Fake phone numbers are used to cheat existing fraud prevention solutions, hence why SEON has added this to its arsenal of fraud detection features. Similarly, SEON proactively tracks suspicious IP addresses that have been found to be associated with SSH brute force attacks, hacking attempts, malicious IPs, Postfix/IMAP scans, Telnet scans, and spam hosts to further increase the ability of the tools to detect fraudulent activity.

This solution can also detect new, sophisticated threats like the ERMAC trojan, which spreads over phones using the Android operating system and can potentially compromise bank accounts. New malware-as-a-service threats like ERMAC are being developed every day, but even the most well-made malware leaves fingerprints that we can detect.

The update will be available to all current SEON users, as well as all new SEON users. It is the latest in a string of updates, new features and new integrations that SEON have offered over the past year, which includes everything from simplifying GDPR compliance to an app for the hugely popular Shopify online store.

Jimmy Fong, Chief Commercial Officer at SEON, said: “We openly share our new findings on fraud behaviour patterns because this transparent way we display our risk scoring decisions also helps customers learn how to best protect themselves. Creating awareness and sharing knowledge on new ways to detect fraud brings us all one step closer to creating a safer digital environment for every business.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lilidh .