Disclaimer: Everything you’ll read in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We have not manually tested every tool. This article was last updated in Q2 2023. Please feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.

Best ArkOwl Alternatives

Company	Core Features	Notable Clients	Summary
SEON	digital footprint analysis explainable whitebox AI industry presets + customizable rules email, IP + phone data enrichment analysis advanced device fingerprinting	Revolut, Air France, Kindred	Unique in-depth customer profiling and flexible rules
TruValidate	bank/card verification document verification + facial recognition module device fingerprinting and risk analysis email/phone verification powerful range of TransUnion business solutions	Sprint, Citibank National, Betfred	Per-transaction pricing model, can integrate with other TransUnion products to become a true solution
PeopleLooker	social media reverse lookup tool PeopleSmart data enrichment B2B product module for property lookups Chrome extension username search, business search faciliites	N/A	Paywall-protected search tool with six different reverse search facilities
Fraud.net	Full stack fraud prevention for ecommerce and fintech designated AIs specific to common data touchpoints diverse verification services, ID, IP, address, etc. multi-factor authentication module module for compromised business emails	Microsoft, GCHQ, Gartner	ISP intelligence and industry benchmarking
Emailage	email & IP analysis machine learning behavior tracking custom rules & presets taps into the LexisNexis Risk Solutions network	LV= GI, OFX, Gol Airlines	Email intelligence with machine learning to inform risk
Feedzai	AML watchlist screening malware, remote access tool detection uses AI and machine learning out-of-box workflow configurations for fast integration whitebox feedback	PayU, SafetyPay, BTG Pactual	AI-powered risk management platform that handles KYC, AML and uses a watchlist

What Does ArkOwl Offer?

Established by co-founder (and now an engineer for GitHub) Mike Grieling and current CEO Rob Daline, ArkOwl is a persona investigation tool and OSINT search interface. Although it was created to offer users a people search engine, it does provide some fraud prevention capacity in the form of its data enrichment offering, which allows users to verify customer emails and phone numbers by pulling live data from databases. ArkOwl is therefore particularly useful for any companies that want to find out more about their customer’s identities during manual review.

So, how does ArkOwl’s data enrichment tool work? When you enrich data by inputting an email or phone number into its search tool, ArkOwl pulls from social media, WHOIS, webmail hosts, popular service providers and similar databases. All of this is provided in real-time, meaning that you’re not running the risk of drawing stale, potentially irrelevant or outdated data.

This OSINT data can also inform you if an email address has been involved in any data breaches, plus whether the domain name of an email address is linked to a real company. These can provide some clues as to whether a user is a fraudster or genuine – genuine customers are less likely to have a new account that has never experienced a data breach, and much less likely to provide an email account for a fake company.

Why Look for an ArkOwl Alternative?

ArkOwl is primarily a people search tool and it’s not designed to be a standalone fraud prevention solution.

It can therefore be much more useful if you choose to combine it with other fraud detection and prevention options on the market.

Indeed, the company website advertises itself as an integration that adds 81+ points of data to an existing fraud prevention stack. To be a holistic option, ArkOwl’s OSINT should be combined with functionality such as real-time monitoring, KYC, velocity checks and device fingerprinting.

Six ArkOwl Alternatives

If you need some of the above functionalities as a business or are looking to combine ArkOwl with other products on the market, we recommend six alternatives.

SEON

SEON offers data enrichment from 90+ real-time sources, including social media and data breach databases, that helps form an individual’s digital profile. But, unlike ArkOwl, SEON also includes device fingerprinting, velocity scores, AML, as well as risk-scoring customers.

Monitoring customer actions in real-time and combining data enriched from primary data points like a customer’s email, phone and IP address, SEON provides each user with a risk score. This risk scoring system means that you can introduce dynamic friction for customers.

The more risky a customer is, the more friction you can introduce – perhaps in the form of ID verification or a quick call with support to make sure that the customer is genuine and not a fraudster. As this happens before the transaction process, it means that it doesn’t add any unnecessary friction, unless you need to. Genuine customers’ shopping journeys are smoother without compromises to safety, helping you to reduce churn and abandoned shopping carts.

What’s more, SEON’s fraud prevention and detection utilizes both whitebox rule suggestions as well as secondary blackbox machine learning scoring. The primary risk scoring is fully transparent, meaning that you can see under the bonnet how SEON makes a decision about why a user is potentially fraudulent, and even override it if you want.

TruValidate

If you’re looking for an authentication tool that deals with the entire consumer process, then TruValidate might be the right option for you. Previously known as Iovation until its rebranding in 2018, TruValidate has built up a reputation as a solid choice for the iGaming sector, with knowledge and expertise in this area in particular.

However, it’s also an option for any business that’s looking for document, phone and email verification tools with biometric capabilities. TruValidate is a good choice if you’re looking for a well-established verification tool that can draw upon a large database that includes 10 billion unique devices and 117 million recorded instances of fraud and abuse.

However, unlike ArkOwl, the data that TruValidate draws on to verify customers isn’t live, and there are no insights from data enrichment from emails and phone numbers due to its lack of email or phone-based data enrichment. Another potential weakness of TruValidate is that it also doesn’t offer machine learning, which means that your team will have to build their own risk rules for your customers.

PeopleLooker

PeopleLooker is another people and social media search tool on the market. It offers in-depth OSINT, particularly in terms of public records – by searching a customer’s name, phone number or email address, you might be able to find out addresses, phone numbers or other records affiliated with this data.

As you can use it to find out if someone has a criminal record associated with their name, phone number, or email address, PeopleLooker can help you prevent fraud. Moreover, if your customer has a previous history of fraudulent activity, then it’s possible that they’re a criminal looking to exploit your transaction process, for example, or take other fraudulent actions on your site.

However, PeopleLooker is a people search tool, not a standalone fraud prevention tool. This means that it will probably work best combined with designated fraud prevention and detection tools on the market that offer other useful facilities like watchlists and digital footprinting. You might find that manually searching for users with PeopleLooker is a slow process: Each search can take around six minutes, meaning that it may not be appropriate for businesses looking to scale their research.

Fraud.net

Fraud.net is a full-stack solution that is capable of covering most, if not all, of your fraud-fighting needs.

This suite of fraud prevention tools was conceived so companies can have control and knowledge over their risk exposure from multiple perspectives: top-down for executives, hands-on for fraud techs, and a fast overview for management and deployment. Inside their offerings, there are modules to address the most common fraud vulnerabilities for their target market: enterprise-level ecommerce and finance.

The platform is meant to be a central hub for stacking all kinds of business software solutions via API. Indeed, ArkOwl itself could be integrated into the Fraud.net hub to augment the data already offered (though that already includes some social media intelligence).

The company’s founders arrived at fraud prevention from previous executive roles, and some of Fraud.net’s functionality reflects that. Fraud concerns that are more common to upper management are part of what the suite offers, such as business email recovery, collusion and insider threat intelligence, and built-in industry benchmarking. As such, smaller businesses may find that Fraud.net is an overmatch for their needs, in terms of both the technology and the price point.

Emailage

Emailage’s core facility is its email lookup tool. This makes it particularly convenient for businesses looking to find out more about a customer taking actions on their site. One key aspect of Emailage is that it also offers risk scoring for email addresses too, providing real-time alerts to users if an address is flagged as being suspicious.

Well-established and part of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) network, Emailage draws upon a large database of 5.9 billion identifiers, plus previous transaction data from over 150 countries.

Emailage is useful for businesses looking to customize rulesets for risk scoring too and also uses machine learning suggestions. This can make it flexible and therefore allows you to comply with changing regulations with ease.

However, one of Emailage’s main weak spots is that it doesn’t offer phone or IP lookup alongside its email lookup tool. This means that businesses in need of a more well-rounded offering might need to look elsewhere. This is most likely inside of LNRS’ extensive stack of fraud solutions.

If you’re already using other LexisNexis tools, you might find that Emailage matches favorably with their other offerings, expensive as they may be. But at the same time, it is known to not be as easy to integrate with some other vendors’ solutions.

Feedzai

Founded in 2011, Feedzai is a risk management platform that uses cutting-edge machine learning to identify fraudulent transactions. This makes it particularly appealing to those operating in ecommerce, financial services, and retail. According to the company, Feedzai offers complete protection, know-your-customer (KYC), and anti-money laundering protection (AML), plus watchlist screening.

It offers some degree of flexibility too when it comes to its AML solutions, as you can adjust the parameters for your own business needs. This makes it a choice for banks and other financial institutions looking to stay compliant with regulations across different countries, as well as any changes to those regulations. Feedzai also offers scalability for businesses that need to add additional payment channels over time.

As Feedzai is a solution built for enterprise-level businesses, its customers should have a knowledgeable fraud team within their infrastructure to get the most out of it.

Choosing the Best ArkOwl Alternative

Whether ArkOwl or indeed its alternatives are right for you will very much depend on your own business needs. While some companies will need a comprehensive fraud detection and prevention suite, others will only need certain facilities. You might also be looking to combine a few different products on the market together, in which case many of these choices could work for you.

Finding the fraud solution best suited to your organization’s needs is no easy task, particularly considering the ever-shifting nature of the fraud landscape at large as well as other needs. This is all in addition to adjacent legislation too. More important than finding the best solution today is having any solution in place at all.

Regardless of the choice that you make for a fraud prevention provider, that decision will need reinspection as your company grows and changes.

ArkOwl Alternatives FAQ