A Question of Scale
One of the defining characteristics of our modern digital economy is scale. Business is global; commerce is global; finance is global. Regrettably, fraud is also global.
Our clients have vast customer bases, and accordingly, they bear huge responsibilities when it comes to protecting those customers, and earning and maintaining their trust. Moderns businesses also have to contend with widespread expectations of — and demand for — convenience, speed, and accessibility. Simultaneous to this, companies have to continue to grow and be competitive.
These are not insignificant pressures, and the stakes get exponentially higher the larger the company.
250 million customers. 250 million vulnerabilities.
One of our clients is a global social commerce platform. They have more than 250 million active users every month. To the company, that’s 250 million customers to take care of. To a fraudster, that’s 250 million points of attack. 250 million vulnerabilities. 250 million hijackable tools with which to commit fraud.
Our client chose to partner with us because their brand was suffering reputational damage, and users were churning out. Fraudsters were creating fake accounts — and taking over existing user account — at bulk levels, and then using those accounts to spam attack legitimate users. Our client had tools in place, but they couldn’t keep up with the rate of attack. Account takeover (ATO) attacks have become extremely sophisticated. They’re generally massive in scale, and highly coordinated. Often, fraudsters harness enormous bot armies to execute the attacks, making it all the more difficult to capture the full scale of the assault until after it’s too late. Looking at single events, users, or actions in isolation doesn’t provide the information necessary to identify large-scale ATO in real time. Our client’s coverage was comparatively limited, and alerts were sometimes triggering weeks too late.
After choosing DataVisor’s comprehensive AI-powered fraud solution, the results were immediate and dramatic. 99% of all spammers captured, with 80% of new fake accounts blocked at the point of signup — before any damage could happen, and before any attack activity could commence.
170 million total reviews. 10k fake reviews blocked every day.
Another of our clients is a leading U.S.-based online reviews platform. Their platform hosts over 170 million total reviews. But fake reviews and spam were presenting an increasingly serious problem. Not only was their reputation at risk — and accordingly, their bottom line — but compliance issues were brewing. They had content review systems in place, but these systems were ineffective in the face of fake reviews coming in at such a large scale.
It wasn’t just scale. The fraudsters targeting their platform were patient and meticulous, often “incubating” accounts for long periods, and engaging in seemingly “normal” activity as they built up behavioral equity on the platform. It wasn’t just spam either. Accounts were used to deliberately boost certain businesses, while simultaneously denigrating competitors. The results they achieved after integrating DataVisor’s solution provide a sense of just how big the challenges were — today, they’re preventing 10k fake reviews and blocking the creation of 2k new malicious accounts every single day.
Attack for attack, and scale for scale
These are just a few use cases that offer a glimpse into the scale of modern fraud. In our intelligence center, you’ll find many more examples, as well as the two case studies discussed above. Time and again, what we see are slow-to-adapt, reactive, legacy solutions being outmaneuvered by sophisticated fraudsters leveraging a wide array of tools and techniques to commit complex and coordinated attacks at scale. In every one of these instances, and for every one of our clients, what we do is apply solutions that can match fraudsters attack for attack, and scale for scale.
