When it comes to online fraud, most people have a zero tolerance policy. Common sense tells us that nobody wants to be conned out of their money, let alone their emotional state of being. While they say love is blind, online lonely hearts may also be turning the other cheek to potential fraud for the sake of a little companionship.

According to the article, “Online dating scams harm ‘thousands’ in Lee County,” Stacey Payne of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office community relations department says oftentimes those seeking love online either don’t want to believe it, are embarrassed, or simply don’t mind that the person they are in love with is a scammer. (more…)

I’m weird. I know this because people tell me all the time. They tell me I’m weird because I like to do things that most people don’t. I like to do things that are different, and different usually means weird. One of my little weird things is posing as a woman. Yup. Read on.

I like to expose the flaws in our systems, to find what makes us vulnerable. Much of my “research” (or my “antics,” as some would say) is prompted by my desire to learn more about the scumbags of society, who prey on others. So I sign up for online dating sites, create a profile as a woman, and wait for men to contact me. My research has led me to discover some particularly shady methods scammers use to target emotionally vulnerable victims. The most common is an advanced fee scam involving a wire transfer.

A divorced mother of three in Britain was taken for £80,000 by a scammer posing as a US soldier. It began when a man who called himself Sergeant Ray Smith introduced himself on a dating website. Soon they were chatting and emailing regularly, and then he was calling her on the phone and asking her to wire him money. (more…)

While the hot new iPad provides an exciting platform to surf the web, exchange emails and read books, users are also using the computer tablet to access their existing accounts on social networking sites, play virtual games, and make online purchases much like they would on their home computer.

This past week, iovation has seen a rapid adoption of the iPad being used at our customer sites. We’ve seen the number of iPad transactions grow by thousands every single day since the new device was made available. And these transactions aren’t just occurring within the same industry. In fact, we’re seeing iPad transactions on a multitude of verticals including travel sites, social networks, sportsbooks, dating sites, credit issuers, MMOs and online social games. And our job is to make sure that the transactions processed are from legitimate, good customers.

Topping the list of industries where we’ve seen the most online transactions this week is online communities at 45%, with the majority on social networking sites as opposed to dating sites. The second largest group was online retail, accounting for 28% of total iPad transactions. Most of those transactions occurred on travel sites. And lastly, international gambling sites such as sportsbooks came in third, at 23% of all iovation-protected iPad transactions.

So that’s where we’re helping customers, but what information do fraud teams share within our database in order to reduce fraud losses and ensure good customers have a positive experience on their site?

iovation tracks over 30 different types of bad behavior and this segmentation is important to our customers. How they treat evidence (specific types of fraud and abuse) changes across various industries. For example, an online retailer cares about mitigating chargebacks and catching criminal activity before product goes out the door, whereas an online community cares more about stopping spam, solicitations, predators and phishing attempts, in order to protect community members and maintain a safe and trusted environment.

Our customers can customize our fraud protection service to gain control over the specific transactions and activities that they correlate with high risk. This allows them to take more business with confidence and spend less time conducting costly manual reviews.

Believe it or not, within the first week of iPad sales, we have already uncovered fraudulent activity. Over half of all transactions denied from iPads were specifically related to credit card fraud. In other words, they were fraudsters attempting to monetize stolen identities on our customers’ websites.

As iPads connect to online businesses to create accounts, submit applications and make purchases, it is very important for organizations to know whether or not the device:

• has committed fraud or abuse on their site
• has committed fraud or abuse at another business
• has relationships with other devices or accounts that have been involved with fraud or abuse
• has not been seen before, but matches the profile of other high-risk or suspect devices

As iovation’s global shared database of over 275 million devices grows, so do the reputations of iPads used to request transactions. This is important information that companies can use to determine whether or not a transaction requested by an iPad, or any other Internet device, can be trusted and just the kind of information iovation provides to its valued customers.