This article explores the concept of empowering customer protection through proactive real-time monitoring.
It highlights the importance of staying ahead of emerging security threats and discusses the power of implementing a proactive monitoring system. We also emphasize the need for businesses to actively monitor and analyze security threats in real time to ensure the safety and protection of their customers. We’ll also look at the benefits of such an approach, including early threat detection, rapid response, and enhanced customer trust. By implementing proactive real-time monitoring, businesses can effectively safeguard their customers and mitigate potential security risks.
Why should businesses care about fraud in 2023?
For e-commerce sites and financial institutions, the risk of online fraud has never been higher. Thanks to a combination of factors, like the increase of online shopping and the rising popularity of neobanks.
Fraud is also costing consumers, Americans lost more than $5.8 billion to fraud in 2021. Scammers are increasingly targeting neobank users because of customers’ increased ability to make instant payments and so more impulsive purchases, as well as potentially decreased transaction monitoring. Fraud is eroding the customer experience, with 86% of customers believing that the companies they do business with could be doing more to protect them against fraud.
Customers are also vulnerable to account takeover and credit card fraud, which involves using their stolen credentials in order to make purchases online. This is usually gained via purchasing leaked customer information on the dark web, or by tricking a customer into providing this information via phishing attacks. If an e-Commerce site doesn’t have the security checks in place, then criminals may be able to purchase goods with these stolen details – costing businesses large sums of money through chargebacks and their resolution.
We’ll now look at one of the most effective ways to prevent online fraud – real-time monitoring, explaining how it helps you to respond rapidly to threats, and catch criminals using new and increasingly advanced ways of exploiting your business.
How real-time fraud monitoring is the best way to stay proactive about fraud
What is real-time fraud monitoring? It includes any surveillance tools which enable you to detect and report fraud based on fresh data. According to a fraud monitoring guide, they’re “end-to-end software deployed wherever customers interact with your product or service”, and you can think of fraud monitoring as “like a firewall.” They work in the background 24/7 and usually analyze data from key areas of your customer’s journey, such as the registration process or during a transaction.
What’s more, real-time monitoring provides you with alerts. This means that the person overseeing the system will know that there has been a fraud report from the tool.
When monitoring user behavior in real time, fraud monitoring tools utilize what’s known as device fingerprinting and behavioral analysis in general.
Behavioral analysis should also be in your real-time monitoring arsenal
Behavioral analysis is also a useful real-time monitoring approach for all types of online businesses. Behavior analysis is an umbrella term for any type of analysis which involves looking at how a customer uses your site – and whether their behavioral patterns match those of a typical user. It often includes device fingerprinting, typing cadence, how a customer moves their cursor, and how quickly they progress through the customer journey.
Software tools employing behavior analysis will usually come with rulesets that determine what customer behavior looks suspicious, and what matches a typical user profile. It might determine, for instance, that particular transactions are merely suspicious, or that some should be rejected completely. Those that are suspicious might undergo a manual review from a team of fraud analysts, or a customer might simply be asked to provide additional verification information.
Fraud prevention behavior analysis tools often employ machine learning, which means that they can draw on historical user data in order to suggest different risk rules to you. Machine learning behavior analysis tools can make decisions much faster than a team of fraud analysts, meaning that it usually decides in real-time whether a customer is suspicious or not. Machine learning also means you can learn about new criminal behaviors, catching them before they can exploit your system based on new techniques.
In our next section, we’ll look at one specific type of behavior analysis – device fingerprinting – and how it can help you spot criminals on the basis of their device and browser.
Device fingerprinting and how it works
Device fingerprinting involves assigning each customer accessing a business’s site with a unique hash generated from their combination of browser setup and the device model that they’re using. Device fingerprinting can also provide you with information like what operating system a customer is using, and what their system country and language is.
Why is device fingerprinting useful for businesses looking to stop fraud? For financial institutions, it’s particularly useful as it tells you when someone logs into a customer’s account from a different country, or an IP address that comes from a high-risk country. Device fingerprinting immediately flags this login as suspicious, and financial institutions can then run additional security checks to ensure that the user logging in is the account owner.
For e-Commerce sites, device fingerprinting can tell you if a user is logging on from a high-risk location or IP address. It can also tell you whether the customer is using a VPN, or Tor browser or is using an emulator, which can lead to the user being flagged as suspicious. You can then introduce additional security checks to ensure that they are a legitimate customer and not a criminal.
Fraud monitoring in real-time has benefits to all online businesses due to the ability to catch criminals more quickly, no matter the time of day or year. It usually encompasses behavior analysis tools like device fingerprinting. With a combination of tools to hand, you can generate a much clearer picture of who is using your site and whether they’re suspicious or not. Catching criminals before they have a chance to exploit you and your users can save you time, money, and trust from your most valued customers.
