Fraud Prevention

Tolerance to Fraud Provides Fraudsters with Incentives to Attack

September 11, 20194 min Read

Fraud has grown into a global epidemic and is impacting businesses, irrespective of their size or scale of operations. Fraudsters are orchestrating a myriad of attacks at every available customer touch-point across industries—even non-financial use cases including spam, social media, and reviews—and monetizing them.

Businesses and Customers Suffer

Business growth, operational costs, revenues, customer experience, and brand reputation are at stake for digital businesses as they make efforts to fight fraud and online abuse. Given that the adversary is technologically superior and strategic in approach, businesses are often left playing the catch-up game.

While businesses identify use cases for fraud prevention and weigh the return on investments, it is the customers that face the real consequences who may have to spend time and effort to reclaim their digital identity, or repay the loan that they never sought, or never be able to undo the damage done to their credit, or not be able to make purchases online—the possibilities are endless.

Cost of Doing Business Fuels Cyber Crime

As digital businesses try to balance customer expectations with operational cost and fraud management, they have become accustomed to bearing some amount of fraud losses as cost of doing business. This provides fraudsters with enough incentive to build upon the tolerance levels and continue to finance their attacks.

When aggregated at a global scale, these incentives constitute a thriving cyber crime business, which according to a CyberSecurity Ventures estimate will cost businesses about $6 trillion by 2021. While fraud losses may constitute a fraction of operational costs for digital businesses, they are fueling the emergence of cyber crime as a parallel economy with profits about 15-20% higher than other crimes put together.

The fraud losses that digital business absorb are also fueling an entire ecosystem that not only powers the business of cyber crime but also benefits from it. For instance, identity farms create synthetic identities and test credentials harvested from breaches/hacks, click-farms and sweatshops provide 'employment' to humans to carry out nuanced attacks, arms dealers provide sophisticated tools and criminal tool-kits to launch complex attacks at scale.

The Fraud Cycle

With every successful attack, fraudsters get funds to finance their next misadventure as well as a template to emulate for subsequent attacks—until of course, businesses catch up to plug-in the loopholes. This has created a vicious cycle of cyber crime where fraudsters attack, businesses catch-up, and fraudsters work their way out to escape. In addition, fraudsters are continually upgrading their attack techniques and leveraging technology to perpetrate complex attacks, maximize the exploits, and evade detection.

Zero Tolerance to Fraud

Inadequate resistance from businesses is making it easier for fraudsters to monetize their attacks with virtually no risk. To safeguard their customers and business interests from online abuse, businesses must adopt a 'zero tolerance to fraud' approach and render the attack financially non-viable.

Arkose Labs fights fraud and online abuse with its multi-tier, unified, and long-term approach which is rooted in prevention and stopping of abusive attacks at the point of entry. To sustain their fight against fraud, businesses must hit fraud at its roots and erode the financial incentives associated with an attack.

Break the Fraud Business Model with Arkose Labs

The Arkose Labs Fraud and Defense Platform is based on an integrated approach that combines global telemetry with adaptive step-up enforcement challenges. The platform provides in-depth, real-time insights into attacker identification that help deploy appropriate responses or corrective measures. It analyzes each transaction across multiple parameters to assess its legitimacy and identify risky profiles. Based on the risk scores, smart enforcement are presented intelligently that deliver targeted and accurate friction for fraudsters to drain their resources and hurt profitability from the attack. The genuine customers are secured throughout their digital journey while enjoying a seamless user experience.

To learn how Arkose Labs can help you fight fraud and online abuse with zero tolerance to fraud, schedule a demo now.