A $20 identity can turn into an $80 profit, one signup bonus at a time.
Sign-up bonuses and loyalty programs look harmless, until fraudsters turn them into a repeatable business. Arkose Labs COO Frank Teruel breaks down bonus abuse and loyalty program fraud, and how sharing risk data in real time can kill the incentive instantly.
About the speaker
Just imagine you're a credit card company and you're saying, hey, sign up for my credit card, and on the spot I give you a $100 gift card. Fraudster goes online for 20 bucks, gets a KYC, an identity, and makes $80 on every transaction.
We share data with the affected entity, and we go, hey, this is a high-risk transaction. As soon as they see that, the bonus gets taken down to nothing. Now there's no incentive to do it.
Fake account registrations is really big right now. You can sit there and watch these things register for accounts that can sit dormant for everything from pig-butchering scams, all the way to linking loyalty programs.
The originating entity goes, I assume the person that has the linking account did the checking, and then these people use it to kind of scrape and pull down that digital currency or those loyalty programs.
Imagine you're a credit card company, and you're saying, sign up for my credit card and on the spot I'll give you a hundred dollar gift card. A fraudster goes online for twenty bucks, gets a KYC identity, and makes eighty dollars on every transaction. We do a lot of bonus abuse protection where we go, wait a minute, there's something here that isn't right. How do we do it? We share data with the affected entity, and we say, this is a high-risk transaction. As soon as they see that, the bonus gets taken down to nothing, and now there's no incentive to do it.
Fake account registrations are really big right now. You can watch these things register for accounts that sit dormant, for everything from pig-butchering scams — where I register with a dating site, sit on the account, slowly develop a reputation, and ultimately use that to defraud someone who thinks they're in a relationship — all the way to linking loyalty programs. Imagine signing up with your favorite hotel's account, and someone's got a United or American Airlines number with tons of points. Those points on their balance sheet are billions of dollars they're trying to get rid of. So they link these accounts — the originating entity assumes the person with the linking account did the checking, and then these people use it to scrape and pull down that digital currency or those loyalty programs.
Stopping bots, AI agents, and fraud before they reach your users.
