SEON enables TurboTenant to combine identity verification with additional risk signals

About TurboTenant

TurboTenant is an all-in-one property management platform that serves over 1 million DIY landlords and real estate investors. The platform handles everything from listing properties and generating leads to creating lease agreements and collecting rent. TurboTenant is growing quickly through both organic adoption and acquisitions, and is on track to process roughly $7.5 billion in payments annually.

Challenge

Prior to TurboTenant partnering with SEON, the company’s fraud team was drowning in manual reviews. Their internal admin tool could only handle basic filtering. If the team wanted to add complexity to a rule, they looked to developers to build it. And as Eric Taylor, TurboTenant’s Manager of Trust and Safety, put it: “The number of data points we receive from our users, device information and property records creates a very large amount of information to process. With the volume of users that come through our platform, this combination of data requires complex solutions to protect our business, our users and their tenants.” With more than 7,000 reviews per month, the ability to identify real threats instantly became a major difference maker for TurboTenant.

As TurboTenant scaled and began acquiring companies, the fraud landscape got more complicated in two specific ways. First, their payments business – now roughly $8 billion a year – needed the same level of protection that their listing and syndication side had, but the internal tools weren’t built for that complexity. Second, the fraud itself was evolving. Account takeovers were rising. Bad actors were getting better at hiding behind clean-looking tunnels and VPNs. And on the identity side, TurboTenant was asking landlords to upload deeds, insurance documents and LLC incorporation papers as part of Know Your Customer (KYC), a process that drove legitimate users off the platform while still failing to catch sophisticated fakes.

While document-based verification still plays a role in certain cases, TurboTenant needed to reduce friction and reliance on manual document review wherever possible.

What changed?

Payment fraud and account takeover

TurboTenant started with syndication fraud – the highest-volume risk on their platform and, because the financial exposure per event is lower, a safe place to build confidence in the system. Within the first year, they reached 70% automation on syndication decisions.

They then migrated their entire payments operation into SEON. Taylor and his team worked closely with SEON’s Managed Risk Services team to build out the rules they needed. Some mirrored what they’d had before. Others were designed to handle the more complex fraud patterns their old tool couldn’t touch.

The result was an 80% reduction in the number of payment fraud alerts the team needed to review. At the same time, they were catching things that may have been overlooked before. Account takeovers, in particular, dropped by more than 4x, largely because SEON enabled them to bring multiple risk signals together into a single decisioning workflow. These sequences of actions may have appeared normal, but together told a clear story of a compromised account.

Advanced threat detection

With the bulk of their alerts under control, Taylor’s team shifted to what he calls “threat hunting,” proactively tracking down fraud that doesn’t trip standard rules. Much of this includes bad actors operating from overseas who have gotten sophisticated at disguising their location. Basic VPN and proxy detection no longer catches them. TurboTenant is now identifying these actors through a broader set of technical and behavioral indicators that are tougher to manipulate, and more effective when layered with identity verification.

Identity verification (IDV)

Before SEON, TurboTenant’s landlord verification process relied on document uploads: deeds, tax statements, insurance paperwork and LLC incorporation papers. Legitimate landlords abandoned the platform because they didn’t have those documents at hand. Others submitted documents that were getting harder to authenticate as forgery techniques improved.

The deeper problem was structural. Document collection produced no surrounding context. When a verification session concluded, TurboTenant had the document and a pass or fail status but lacked information about the device used, the user’s location or whether behavior before and after the session looked consistent with a legitimate landlord. A bad actor operating overseas who paid a US resident to complete verification on their behalf could pass cleanly, with nothing in the record to surface the handoff.

With SEON, TurboTenant rebuilt their approach around a different philosophy: Identity verification (IDV) is the escalation point, not the default. Most landlords never reach it.

SEON’s digital footprint signals and device intelligence, including geolocation and behavioral signals, assess whether a landlord is who they say they are before any verification step triggers. A landlord with a consistent digital history, a clean device profile and an IP that matches their listed property location has already told a coherent story. Adding document verification introduces friction without adding meaningful signals.

IDV comes in where the signals diverge – where the device is unfamiliar, the IP doesn’t match or the behavioral pattern around a first payment looks inconsistent with prior activity. At that point, TurboTenant escalates to SEON’s identity verification suite, which includes ID document checks, liveness detection and proof of address for landlord KYC.

Legitimate landlords experience less friction because the signal set gives high confidence about their identity before any verification step is needed. And when IDV does trigger, the surrounding context makes each session more diagnostic. The verification outcome sits alongside everything SEON has already captured: device history, digital footprint, geolocation during the session and behavioral signals before and after. A landlord who completes an IDV session on a consistent device with a clean prior record looks very different from someone who appears on a US residential connection for the duration of the session and shifts back to an overseas device immediately after. The session result is the same. The picture the full record tells is not.

“Everyone knows where their face is. We’re focusing much more on who they are, and basing our KYC on the likelihood that the individual – with all of the surrounding data – is going to commit fraud.”

Eric Taylor, Manager of Trust & Safety, TurboTenant

Platform abandonment during landlord onboarding dropped significantly after the transition. The team is now detecting fraud patterns their previous approach was structurally unable to surface.

Supporting law enforcement investigations

TurboTenant’s use of SEON’s device log data has extended into law enforcement support. When a detective working a real estate fraud case reached out to Taylor’s team, the investigation had stalled for months. SEON’s logs provided what the detective needed: precise timestamps of every account action, linked to ISP data that confirmed the user’s actual location when each action occurred. The device data was non-proxied, giving law enforcement a clean chain of evidence to work from.

Taylor, who has prior experience supporting law enforcement investigations at a major tech company, helped the detective to understand how to chain subpoenas into search warrants using the SEON data. “Every law enforcement officer we’ve worked with, when they see the logs, they say the same thing – it’s a gold mine,” Taylor said. 

Scaling through acquisitions

TurboTenant is an acquisitive company, and one of the unexpected benefits of building on SEON has been how painlessly they can extend fraud protection to newly acquired platforms. When TurboTenant acquired a major competitor, their development team handed the new company’s engineers the same API calls they were already using. The acquired platform immediately inherited TurboTenant’s rules, automation and risk intelligence. Taylor’s analysts could cross-train on the existing alert systems right away.

That kind of integration normally takes a few months or more. In this case, they had process parity from day one with the option for configurability within the SEON command center. And the pattern repeats. Every time TurboTenant acquires a company or launches a product with a new risk surface, standing up fraud protection is a small development task; usually a one-day sprint to set up an API call rather than a project that requires building a new risk management tool from scratch.

“It’s become a real comfort at the executive level. When we have a new product or a new risk surface, the conversation is: do we need to put something in SEON? And if the answer is yes, it’s an extra small dev task. A one-day sprint. Not ‘do we have the dev resources, when are we going to work this in, and how are we going to maintain this tool?’”

Eric Taylor, Manager of Trust & Safety, TurboTenant

The role of Managed Risk Service

Throughout the payments migration and beyond, TurboTenant has worked closely with SEON’s Managed Risk Services (MRS) team. Taylor credits his MRS advisor as a key part of the relationship, not just in setting up rules during the initial migration, but in ongoing threat hunting and rule refinement as new fraud patterns emerge. When Taylor’s team spots an unusual pattern, they work with the MRS team to turn it into a production rule quickly, without waiting for a development cycle.

Conclusion

Taylor described SEON as “a real force multiplier” for his team. When asked what sets the platform apart, he pointed to agility above all else. The ability to see a problem, build a rule and have it running, without filing a developer ticket and waiting for a sprint, has fundamentally changed how quickly TurboTenant can act on new threats. That agility extends across their business; new products, new acquisitions and new risk surfaces all get the same level of protection with minimal friction.

“We love SEON. It’s been a real force multiplier for us to fight fraud”

Eric Taylor, Manager of Trust & Safety, TurboTenant