Money laundering. It sounds clean, but it’s a dirty business. According to PWC, “global money laundering transactions are estimated at 2 to 5% of global GDP, or roughly U.S. $1-2 trillion annually.” As attack techniques become more sophisticated, the landscape for money laundering is changing quickly. This means that the [...]
Money laundering is big business. Criminals use money laundering techniques to cover up funds acquired through illegal activity and make it appear as if they were generated through legitimate and legal means. The fraudster aims to conceal that the funds exist, how he or she acquired them and where they [...]
Matching wits with a nefarious user. Solving a puzzle where you have to find missing clues. Determining what steps they’ll take next. Getting an adrenaline rush when hot on the trail of a bad guy. Protecting good customers and keeping them safe. These all describe a typical day in the [...]
Our first webinar is in the books! In our Fraud Detection Tools Webinar, DataVisor co-founder and CTO Fang Yu and I broke down four major tools for fraud detection: Reputation Lists, Rules Engines, Supervised Machine Learning, and Unsupervised Analytics. Based on my blog post, “Unsupervised Analytics: Moving Beyond Rules Engines and [...]
In my last post, I talked about technology and, in particular, components in a fraud-detection architecture. But when it comes to building a fraud strategy, it’s not just about technology. Perhaps equally, if not more, important are the people who analyze and review cases to catch fraudsters. This post is [...]
Rules engines, machine learning models, ID verification, or reputation lookups (e.g. email, IP blacklists and whitelists) and unsupervised analytics? I've often been asked which one to use and should you only go with one over the others. There is a place for each to provide value and you should anticipate [...]
As we heard in our last meetup, the priority for any online marketplace or community is protecting its users. Significant resources are spent on time, technology and policies to make sure that users are safe, happy and secure. Since users are also the baseline by which many of these marketplaces, games [...]
When building online marketplaces, there are a few rites of passage to go through that are pretty ubiquitous. First, you try to build traction and attract more users. Once you do that, you’ll hit a milestone, be it one million users, one million transactions, or anything of the like that [...]
Whether you need to buy something, get a ride, sleep somewhere, or just get someone else’s perspective on where to eat dinner, there are no shortage of online marketplace options. The explosion of the peer-to-peer and sharing economies provide more than just new opportunities for you, it also creates a [...]
Last week we held our second Trust and Safety Meetup, this time in the South Bay, at the offices of Upwork. The event was a success, filled with pizza, a panel packed with experts and a great networking and information sharing opportunity for our group. Never fight fraud without [...]
As a kid, I was fascinated with Sherlock Holmes and Batman. I read many of their detective stories and comic books and my childhood dream was to be just like them. Both are known for using their detective skills to track their adversaries, outsmart them, and solve difficult crime cases. [...]
