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.

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iovation knows that when your business is on the line, speed and reliability matter.  Whether it is page load times for your customers, or the speed in which we can provide you real-time reputation analysis, every millisecond counts.

There are many facets to building a highly available, lightning fast infrastructure (which we will cover in more depth in future blog posts), but today I would like to start at the very beginning with our DNS architecture.

The first thing that happens when an iovation ReputationManager 360 customer (or a customer’s end user) tries to connect is a DNS (Domain Name System) lookup to convert a name (like www.iovation.com) to an IP address (74.121.28.140).  This DNS query must complete before any further interaction with the service can proceed. (more…)

Relying on a single prevention technique for anything is risky because either the technique doesn’t work for every situation, or someone will figure out how to get around it. This certainly applies to Internet fraud, where prevention specialists work around the clock to stay multiple steps in front of the bad guys.

Fraudsters excel at hiding their true identity. True professionals in the field of fraud detection and prevention must employ a defense-in-depth approach, and iovation deploys one of the most sophisticated with a multi-tiered approach to recognize trouble when it is near. Our innovative service to recognize risk has been constantly refined over the past six years. (more…)

A pair of cyberfraud advisories were issued to warn businesses and consumers about corporate account takeover fraud.

According to Errol Weiss, who runs the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) corporate account takeover task force, the effort by his group and other federal law enforcement agencies is to make businesses and consumers more aware of this type of cybercrime and provide recommendations on how they can protect themselves against such attacks. (more…)

Follow the money is a phrase we’re all familiar with. Unfortunately, it also happens to be a favorite mantra for fraudsters, too.

As more and more merchants offer mobile payment options to their customers, cyber criminals are quickly moving into the mobile channel. In the Digital Transactions article, “Mobile-payments fraud starts to take its toll,” a recent study by Javelin Strategy & Research found that fraud losses from mobile payments as a percentage of total revenue were 1.13% compared to the 0.83% for online-only merchants and 0.86% for multi-channel merchants.

This trend doesn’t surprise Jim Rice, director of market planning for retail and e-commerce marketing at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. While the mobile channel represents a new way for businesses to connect with their customers, it’s also another opportunity where fraudsters will try to make a dishonest buck. (more…)

As we wrap up the third quarter of 2010, iovation continues to see significant growth in the total number of device reputation checks performed for online businesses, along with the number of unique devices managed in the Device Reputation Authority (DRA) database.

With only three months remaining, iovation has already increased the annual growth rate for processed transactions by 67% over 2009. With more than 3.9 billion cumulative device reputation checks processed for e-commerce, financial, travel, gaming and online communities today, we expect to break 4 billion early in Q4.

We’ve also increased the overall number of unique devices by 110% over last year. Starting in 2006 with 5 million devices in our system, we now manage more than 390 million unique devices (including PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries, Android, etc.). Surpassing 400 million unique devices is just on the cusp.

With cybercrime fraud losses more than doubling in 2009, Internet-based businesses need security solutions that allow them to proactively identify and make educated decisions on all incoming transactions. Through fraud and abuse evidence submitted by our worldwide, cross-industry subscriber base, iovation ReputationManager 360 combines device and account profiles, analytics, custom reporting, real-time business rules, device anomalies, and the experience and expertise of over 2,000 fraud analysts to help customers make quick, confident decisions on every online transaction request.

When it comes to managing risk for online transactions, we get a lot of questions about how our approach compares to other commercial solutions. Establishing business rules and risk scoring in combination with device reputation ranks high among topics of interest. Simply put, iovation uses the device and transaction data available to any vendor, and combines it with the strongest database of historical device risk data available on the market today.

Risk scoring, when you boil it down, is the simple process of taking the data you have available about a given transaction and the device requesting that transaction, and measuring characteristics that would lead you to believe that it is either valid or risky. Most device-based risk scores, including those offered by iovation, incorporate common types of risk elements in their scoring. These may include:

• Velocity-based Rules – Measuring device activity in a given time frame
• Transaction Anomalies – Device characteristics that indicate the device is masking its identity, such as using an anonymizing proxy, or disabling technologies like flash

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With fraudsters better at hiding their true identities, it’s getting more and more difficult to know which online transactions to trust and which to reject. Would if you could confidently identify good transactions from the bad ones before they occurred? How valuable would this intelligence be in your ongoing efforts to reduce the risk of online fraud or abuse? (more…)

As we continue to learn more about how cyber criminals operate, online businesses continue to seek out effective countermeasures against organized fraudsters committing fraud and abuse. Trying to fight fraud alone can be a losing battle. No matter how much information your business has collected to stop criminals, there is a growing number of sophisticated fraudsters out there who are constantly changing their identities and the profile of their computers, to perpetrate fraud across a multitude of verticals.

One of the most effective ways to defend your enterprise is by working together and sharing information with other fraud teams across multiple industries. Interacting with a centralized, global network of fraud intelligence arms you with information upfront to minimize your chances of having to take that first hit. (more…)

Understandably, many sessions at this year’s LOGIN Conference in Seattle centered around game world monetization and payment types. Gaming businesses have a number of monetization models to choose from, including free-to-play, subscription, virtual goods, sponsored branded goods, virtual goods catalog/store front, virtual goods trading, crafting virtual goods, mini games, in-game competitions, and even in-game media assets—such as billboards or sponsored branded events.

To make things even more interesting, there are also different currencies. While the main currency remains to be real-world money as you might expect, secondary currencies include things like player experience, activity and achievement (in other words, gaining points for advancing levels within a game). (more…)