According to a recent Toronto Sun article, “Money scammers target online daters,” Durham Regional Police received several reports—all during the weeks following Valentine’s day—from women claiming they had been scammed by men they met online. After several months of courtship and communications with these men, women then said they were asked to wire money overseas to help with work-related charity efforts. Some women were also conned into providing personal identification and financial details to the suspects and were debited “substantial amounts of money from their personal accounts.”

While stories like these may start to sound more and more familiar, the fact that they keep happening indicates that we need to continue to promote awareness and as scammers continue to work hard at finding new victims and coming up with new scams. Each year, they leverage online dating sites as a platform to swindle lonely hearts out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

In a recent Miami New Times article, “Tech Keeps Scammers Out of Your Heart and Wallet,” iovation reported the following statistics based on activity from the last 90 days alone:

• Over 67,000 instances of spam
• Over 30,000 scams and solicitations
• Over 13,000 member profiles misrepresented
• Over 5,000 cases of identity mining and phishing

That is a lot of fraud and abuse—not to mention, that’s only information from the dating sites using iovation’s fraud protection. Just imagine the amount of fraud happening on all of the other online communities. And, with over 400 million people using dating sites worldwide, the pool of potential victims for fraudsters is huge. That’s why it is imperative that online communities continue to promote awareness about dating scams and put in place the tools necessary to identify fraudsters and prevent them from returning to communities.

• Expose relationships between transactions –Device recognition gives fraud management teams instant visibility into the relationships between all online transactions (fraudulent or not). This provides immediate value in assisting with investigations and resolving issues.
• Receive velocity alerts –The number of purchases, applications, account creations, etc. that originate from one user in a given period of time is highly indicative of fraudulent behavior. For example, wouldn’t it be valuable to know that in the span of one hour, ten credit card applications were all submitted by one person? Unfortunately, since most fraudsters use fake or stolen identities, this can be incredibly hard to detect—unless you focus on the device. With device recognition, you can monitor the velocity of transactions coming from a single device, regardless of the identities provided.
• Identify risky devices –Using a device reputation service allows you to benefit from an increased understanding of the correlation between device attributes and behavior. At iovation, we’ve processed over 2.4 billion online transactions and we’re able to use that information to profile and analyze which device characteristics are mostly likely to indicate fraudulent behavior. With this kind of device intelligence, you’ll be a step ahead by knowing which transactions to review more closely—even if a device has never visited your site before and doesn’t have a known history of fraud or abuse.
• Recognize scammers who have defrauded your peers –From the time you turn on a device reputation service (if it is a shared system, like iovation’s), you immediately have access to the fraud experiences of other companies who subscribe to the service, so if a device accessing your site has already committed fraud elsewhere, you’ll be able to know about it and protect yourself.
• Expose repeat offenders – The ability to identify repeat offenders—who often successfully evade identity-based checks— is one of the key reasons people adopt device reputation systems. It’s like having a wanted poster for the scammer’s PC. If you have been defrauded, you certainly don’t want to let that user back even if they try to mask their identity.

There are significant benefits from using device reputation and many of these benefits can be seen immediately. Device reputation is an essential component of a best practice fraud management system.