Every day iovation assesses risk on more than 7.5 million transactions for the online customers that we protect around the globe. France ranks third by country, just behind the United States and United Kingdom, in the total volume of Internet traffic from any country that we protect. As you would imagine, France is a very important market for us. It is growing and as we continue to expand our international footprint, France will play a vital and strategic part in our growth.

As part of our effort to expand our device identification, device reputation and real-time risk mitigation services for online businesses in France, I am pleased to announce that Philippe Mazurier has joined iovation as Country Manager, heading up sales and business development and is based in Montpellier.

Philippe brings strong business relationships and deep, in-market experience that will be instrumental in helping us meet online fraud protection demands in this market. He understands the serious and damaging impacts that cybercrime has on online businesses.

As we continue to serve the French market, protecting e-commerce, financial services, gaming and online communities from fraud and abuse, having a seasoned veteran in authentication and fraud prevention services representing iovation will help us serve this market even better.

To arrange meetings with Philippe to talk about any fraud or abuse issues your company is experiencing, please email france@iovation.com or call +33 (0)6 69 79 12 33.

In a previous post I discussed virtual currency, which is used to purchase virtual goods within a variety of online communities, including social networking websites, virtual worlds, and online gaming sites. These virtual dollars and virtual goods have real value.

Virtual currency includes the points customers receive from retailers, merchants, airlines, hotels, and credit card companies through loyalty reward programs. These reward points are supposedly the second most traded currency on the planet. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports that digital items within games and social networks accounted for $2.2 billion in sales in 2009, and are expected to account for $6 billion in sales by 2013. Billions more are spent on music and other downloadable digital media.

“Digital goods” are any products that are stored, delivered, and consumed electronically. Within a variety of online communities, including social media and online gaming websites, “virtual currency” is used to purchase virtual goods. Clothing and supplies for Second Life avatars are examples of virtual goods, which sometimes add points and enhance the player’s status within the game. (more…)

As an online fraud prevention company, our goal at iovation is simple: To protect our clients from harmful online activity that can negatively impact their business and customers. Improving our clients’ businesses by greatly reducing fraud and abuse rates is the ultimate reward. Being recognized by our peers is just icing on the cake. This week, we were proud to announce that we had our cake and ate it, too.

On Monday, we were named by AlwaysOn and industry experts as one of the 2011 OnDemand Top 100 winners, which recognizes leadership and game-changing approaches and technologies likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. iovation was chosen for our unique ability to detect online fraudulent activity in real-time and keep our clients’ businesses and customers safe. (more…)

Fraud prevention requires layers of defense. Mature fraud organizations often have several layers that interrogate the transaction details such as name, address, and credit card details, device reputation that starts with device identification, and risk scoring on rules developed over time to detect fraud attempts as well as predict new types of attacks.

In order for the business rules engines to be productive, the rules they operate on need to reflect the particular risks the organization faces. When it comes to customizing business rules, this is not a “one size fits all” model. Giving a retailer, financial institution, or gaming company the ability to easily create and manage rules that are run against their transactions requires a tool that makes it simple to see, add, edit, and experiment with rules.

The iovation business rules editor provides great flexibility in managing the set of rules to be reviewed for transactions such as login, account creation, account change, and checkout. Rule sets are the collections of rules for each end-customer touch point. Rules can be added with a familiar drag-and-drop, enabled and disabled with one click, parameters can be adjusted, and lists of common items can be managed and included. An example of a list is a ‘risky ISP list’, where the user can create a list of risky ISPs and use that same list in multiple rules. If the list changes, all rules leveraging that list will be immediately updated. New rules can be evaluated without impacting scoring results by giving them a zero weight and tracking how frequently they are triggered.

The iovation rules editor provides additional flexibility to help you keep up with the evolution of fraud while protecting your business.

Raising the awareness of fraud and emerging fraud trends is in the best interest of everyone, particularly those who purchase, sell and communicate with others on the Internet. For this year’s Fraud Prevention Month, the annual education and awareness campaign focused on the growing concerns of online fraud.

With total losses to Internet crime topping $599 million in 2009 (the latest annual statistics), educating others about the current state of fraud, evolving fraud tactics, high at-risk groups, and best practices to identify and prevent fraud, plays a critical role in helping consumers and businesses protect themselves from online fraud.

Fraud Prevention Month is also an indicator of how much still needs to be done for businesses to adequately protect themselves and their customers from today’s growing threats. (more…)

Being a sales leader at iovation is an exciting and interesting job. I get to work with companies across a wide spectrum of industries spanning from the traditional, like financial services and retail, to the unique and new – such as gaming, community sites and gambling. On a daily basis, I get to talk with experienced professionals who are focused on a problem that is fundamental to preserving their company’s profitability and viability. One thing I’ve found in these discussions, is that when it comes to stopping fraud and managing risk they have a lot in common. Risk is no longer simply about meeting compliance guidelines, it’s an essential element of online businesses’ strategy.

There is a great recent article in Government Info Security that examines this change titled appropriately, “The Evolution of Risk.” It gives a nice look at the role risk managers play in key strategic decisions and how stopping and analyzing the sources of fraud has been escalated in importance over the past couple of decades. (more…)

iovation is very excited for the Game Developer’s Conference this coming week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

If you’re planning to attend, please stop by booth #611 to tell us about any fraud or abuse issues your business is dealing with.

We’ll share with how iovation’s device identification, device reputation and real-time risk reporting service enables gaming businesses to service their customers more effectively by managing fraud and abuse. We help Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Virtual Worlds keep their players safe and mitigate risk such as chargebacks, code hacking, gold farming, account takeovers, policy violations, chat abuse and virtual asset theft.

iovation protects online gaming sites while protecting the identity and privacy of their players. We stop over 150,000 online fraudulent activities every single day. Most anti-fraud solutions fight fraud by looking at identity information or financial data, but our approach is completely different. We focus on the physical device (computer, tablet or mobile phone) that the player is using to connect to the online game or virtual world. (more…)

I’m extremely happy to announce our new partnership with Besedo, the Swedish-based business process outsourcing company that offers content moderation, safety and customer retention. Through this partnership, Besedo will extend iovation’s advanced fraud and abuse prevention services to its customers in online classifieds, auctions, social networks, online dating and gaming websites.

As expanding businesses combat an array of online crimes such as credit card fraud, phishing, forgery and money laundering, our customers’ collective experiences are reported and shared in our database of over half a billion unique device reputations, which include computers, tablets and mobile phones. (more…)

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Dominican Republic Caribbean Gaming Show and Conference in Santo Domingo. As one of the presenters on the online gaming panel, I will examine strategies for identifying high-risk transactions that help sportsbooks and online casinos prevent fraudulent activities like financial fraud, money laundering, fraudulent deposits, player collusion, bonus abuse and account takeover.

Last year more than 60 of iovation’s online betting, poker, sportsbook and casino customers reported and shared 350,000 fraud and abuse attempts through the ReputationManager 360 device reputation service, including the likes of William Hill, Entraction and WagerWorks. These experiences are shared along with our knowledge base of more than 500 million unique devices (computers, tablets and mobile phones) which online gaming sites leverage to gain insight into suspicious activity to prevent fraud before it happens. (more…)

Account takeover happens when your existing bank or credit card accounts are infiltrated and money is siphoned out. A hacked account or stolen credit card is often to blame.

The drop in account takeover may be due in part to a few different things.

Less breaches. There was a drop in data breaches from 221 million records in 604 breaches during 2009 to 26 million records breached in 404 reported breaches during 2010. Criminal hacker Albert Gonzalez and his gang were responsible for many of those hacked records and he and many of his cohorts are now in jail.

PCI standards. All those responsible for accepting credit cards are now under strict Payment Card Industry Standards rules and regulations that require a level of security that took about 5 years to implement. Today many of those merchants are doing a much better job of protecting data.

Device reputation management. Technology that checks an Internet transaction by looking at the PC, smartphone or tablet to see if it has a history of bad behavior or is high risk based on device characteristics and behavior. iovation is one such company that has blocked 35 million fraudulent transactions of this sort just last year. (more…)

When it comes to helping online businesses fight fraud and abuse, iovation is in a league of its own.

After being recognized by the international gaming and online dating communities in January as one of the top technologies for preventing fraud and increasing profitability, productivity and efficiency, we are extremely proud and honored to be recognized by industry leaders in e-Commerce as one of the most innovative fraud fighting tools for online or multi-channel retailers.

To be eligible for the awards, all entrants must be available for online or multi-channel retailers to use for the purpose of measuring, monitoring or mitigating one or more of the following: card-not-present fraud; advancing online data security; improving online payment processes; and advancing the MRC’s vision of making electronic commerce more efficient, safe and profitable.

This week, the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) announced that iovation ReputationManager 360 has been named a finalist for the 2011 MRC Emerging Technology Awards (also known as the METAwards). The awards are judged by a panel of merchants that include the likes of eBay, BestBuy.com, Go Daddy, HP, Microsoft, NCsoft, Tiffany & Co., Urban Outfitters, T-Mobile, among others. (more…)

We’ve recently learned that iovation ReputationManager 360 has been selected by the Info Security Products Guide as a finalist for this year’s Global Excellence Awards. Our fraud prevention service, which combines device identification, device reputation and real-time device risk reporting to prevent card-not-present (CNP) fraud and other online abuses, has been recognized in the categories of Risk Management and Best Security Service.

While this and the other accolades we’ve received lately have been nothing short of overwhelming, we are extremely proud of being recognized by industry leaders and associations across multiple industries. Because we serve online retail, gaming, social community and financial services companies, the acknowledgements have been a testament to iovation’s ongoing commitment to make the Internet a safer place to interact and conduct business, as well as reinforces the positive impact we make in the everyday lives of our customers by protecting their online transactions to reduce fraud rates.

The 2011 Global Excellence Awards will be announced at an awards gala, February 16th, in San Francisco.

We’re pleased to announce that iovation has been named a finalist at the International Gaming Awards (IGA) for 2011 Technology Provider of the Year.

iovation has been providing fraud prevention and anti-money laundering services to the gaming industry for the past 6 years.

In 2010 alone, iovation screened nearly 2 billion transactions and stopped over 35 online fraud attempts. The IGA has recognized iovation’s fraud prevention service for the strong results it has provided to gaming operators such as William Hill, Entraction and WagerWorks. The IGA technology provider award recognizes innovative services that have helped gaming operators increase their profitability, productivity and efficiency. (more…)

To expand our presence in the Japanese market, we’ve partnered with an exceptionally talented team based in Tokyo, called Info Innovation Japan.  Our new partner will extend iovation’s anti-fraud services to Japan’s leading online brands including retailers, social networks, dating sites, online gaming such as MMOs and virtual worlds, and financial services.

(more…)