Practical Fraud Prevention eBook

Practical Fraud Prevention e-Book:

Practical Fraud Prevention ebook download free book in pdf published by Oreilly Media, Author by Gilit Saporta, Shoshana Maraney, released in April 2022 (Early Access).

Over the past two decades, the booming ecommerce and fintech industries have become a breeding ground for fraud. Organizations that conduct business online are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with these invaders. In this practical book, Gilit Saporta and Shoshana Maraney draw on their experience of fraud fighting to provide best practices, methodologies, and tools to help your organization detect and prevent fraud and other malicious activities.

Data scientists, data analysts, and fraud analysts will learn how to identify and quickly respond to attacks. You'll get a comprehensive view of typical incursions as well as recommended detection analytic methods. Online fraud is constantly evolving. This book helps experienced researchers safely guide and protect their organizations in the ever-changing fraud landscape.

With this book, you will:

• Examine current fraud attacks and learn how to mitigate them
• Find the right balance between preventing fraud and providing a smooth customer experience
• Share insights across multiple business areas, including ecommerce and banking
• Evaluate potential risks for a new vertical, market, or product
• Train and mentor teams by initiating hackathons and kickstarting brainstorming sessions
• Get a framework of fraud methods and fraud-fighting analytics

If you were trying to pin down the main difference between an analyst who works extensively with data, and a data scientist, you’d likely touch on the concept of domain expertise as a key value that analysts bring to the table. Data is enormously valuable, but it won’t get the results you’re looking for without a deep understanding of the context. This is particularly important with fraud fighting, since you’re fighting an enemy that actively fights back, changing its techniques and patterns to evade detection and trying to reverse engineer and thus avoid the traps you’ve created to catch them. You don’t want to wait until you have a lot of data about a new attack type or new fraud ring; you want to catch it before that.

Fraud domain experts are often the ones to provide the “secret sauce”, those impactful variables that really boost the performance of a fraud prediction model. If we had to narrow down that “secret sauce,” that domain expertise that every fraud analyst should hone to perfection, we’d say that it ultimately comes down to fraudster profiling. A good analyst helps her team understand that not all fraudsters are created equal. Some of them are amateurs; others are pros. Some of them are native speakers of the language of their victims; others rely on auto-translate. Some are very tech-savvy, so trying to beat them with checkout barriers would be futile (e.g. if they’re using brute force bots, captcha would be counter-productive).

Therefore, it’s essential to learn how to group fraud attacks based on the guesstimated profile of the human being behind them. It’s worth mentioning that user profiling in general is a powerful analytic practice. Many departments seek to better understand their target audience by breaking down the group they’re speaking to into approximate groups, each one of which has specific characteristics, behaviors and pain points. Discussing the groupings they’re using with marketing, sales or product teams can actually be a good, regular touchpoint for fraud teams to get together with other departments and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. It can also help your team work to avoid false positives.