Top 10 Fraud Investigation Software & Tools 2023

SEON Pros

• Flexible and powerful: You could reduce fraud rates by up to 99%, whether ID fraud, account takeovers, or chargebacks. 

• Unique reverse digital footprint lookup: SEON is one of very few fraud investigation software on this list that lets you learn about users’ social media and online profiles.

• Flexible and transparent pricing: You get a completely free plan that only limits the number of API calls you can make. Paid plans are flexible and you can cancel anytime.

• Supports compliance investigations: If you need to go over specific checklists for anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) purposes, SEON has the right features.

SEON Cons

• No on-site integration: If you want your fraud investigation software to live on-premise, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

SAS Pros

• Multi-purpose: You can use SAS for fraud prevention, generic data analytics, and statistical models. 

• Powerful data science tools: More technically-minded fraud managers can play with clustering regression, natural language processing, and more. 

• Social network analysis: Not to be confused with reverse social media lookup, this feature lets you visualize connections between data points. 

SAS Cons

• Dated UI: SAS is a powerful tool but not the best-looking software, unfortunately.
  
• Pricey: As far as investigation tools go, SAS appears to be at the pricier end of the spectrum.

Actico Pros

• Compliance investigation tools: Learn more about your users and transactions to avoid KYC and AML fines.

• Traditional FI experience: Renowned financial institutions trust Actico, so you’re in good hands with its fraud investigation tools. 

Actico Cons

• Dated UI: It’s a legacy product, and it shows. The user experience could be more modern.
  
• Not ideal for all verticals: You’ll get excellent tools for financial products and institutions. Online stores and iGaming companies, among others, should probably look elsewhere. 

TruValidate Pros

• Large anti-fraud tool ecosystem: Since its acquisition by TransUnion, Truvalidate (formerly Iovation) has deployed a handful of powerful anti-fraud tools for specific use cases.
• Full KYC and authentication tools: These include identity document verification (IDV) and biometrics authentication.

TruValidate Cons

• Reliance on proprietary databases: Using shared IP blacklists has its advantages, but it’s possible to manipulate them, and you may miss the latest fraud attacks.
  
• Lengthy onboarding: It starts with a handful of sales calls and then eventually a demo. But you’ll have to sign up for a lengthy contract before you can test TruValidate with your own business data.

Feedzai Pros

• Tier 1 bank experience: Feedzai is a solution of choice for illustrious banking institutions, including Lloyds and Santander.
• Visual link analysis: Offers “hyper-granular” customer profiles to empower human analysts to make better decisions and investigations.

Feedzai Cons

• Tailored to enterprises: As it mainly caters to enterprises, it is not likely to be suitable for smaller companies, including fintechs – while cost remains a concern.
• No alternative data: In a world where your online identity is a clearer indication of who you are than your passport, Feedzai does not provide data enrichment or email analysis tools out of the box.

i-Sight enables companies to have one point of reference for each case, for better, more thorough investigations and allowing various stakeholders to collaborate seamlessly. From there, reports can be easily generated.

When used to catch and mitigate fraud, i-Sight is most useful in figuring out what went wrong in order to get a clearer view of gaps in policy, then implement new processes and fraud rules to prevent it from reoccurring in the future.

i-Sight Pros

• Highly specialized: As it caters to very specific use cases, i-Sight does these very well. However, it does not tailor its investigations to fraud in particular.
• Quick and easy reporting: You can easily export detailed documentation with templates for each case file.

i-Sight Cons

• Internal investigations only: Though this brand is exceptional at managing cases and assisting investigations, it does so for corporate fraud instigated by your employees – or enabled by them.
• No data enrichment: This company has addressed the potential to gather extra data from open source intelligence (OSINT) sources in the past, yet this is underutilized in the current version of the software.

As its creator noted in an April 2016 article on Medium, the evidence collection tool was developed as the web is ever-changing and information is transient. When conducting manual investigations online, nobody should assume the resources, references, and evidence they locate will remain in place for good.

Besides, a lot of very important information present online is not indexed by Google – be it because it’s on the dark web or simply because it’s private to some extent, such as a Facebook group.

Hunchly captures the entire session and lets the investigator keep what they need, be they from law enforcement, cybersecurity, fraud prevention, the media, or investigating privately. This is extremely convenient for anyone whose research needs to be backed up by facts. However, it is not suitable for those who are looking for assistance with the research process itself.

Hunchly Pros

• Built by insiders: One of the tools developed by an expert to optimize their own efforts, Hunchly is not about bells and whistles but about getting the job done reliably.
• Set-and-forget: Because Hunchly runs in the background, you can focus on the essence of your research instead of constantly pausing to capture evidence.

Hunchly Cons

• Investigator wingman: To borrow the words of its creator, this tool looks to assist investigations rather than enable or automate them.
• Doesn’t scale: The research is still conducted manually and relies on the user’s expertise. Though it is excellent at capturing evidence, it will not signpost investigators to new sources nor enrich data.

Nethone’s solution is an excellent device fingerprinting module with some convenient extras. The brand’s Profiler solution looks into a customer’s hardware and software configuration, as well as what they call “passive behavioral biometrics.” The results are fed into a clearbox machine learning algorithm, which produces comprehensible recommendations.

The user interface is sleek and accessible, with customization options aplenty and visualizations to aid investigations – such as connection graphs mapping out links between different customer profiles.

Nethone Pros

• Whitebox ML: Unlike some of its competitors, Nethone’s proprietary machine learning algorithms provide human-readable results so that you can assess their validity independently or even tweak them.
• Quick deployment: The “light integration” promise is that the solution can be part of a risk stack in less than two weeks, with five quick steps. There is also a free 30-minute demo.

Nethone Cons

• Potentially slow results: A few reviewers of Nethone’s software have reported teething pains upon integration. These include taking a while to see results and being uncertain about which rules to implement.
• No digital footprinting: More and more fraud managers acknowledge an individual’s digital footprint as an accurate identifier of who they are, but there is no digital footprinting functionality currently with Nethone.

Pipl Pros

• Large database of business data: Perfect for your KYB investigations.
• API option: While Pipl lets you perform ad hoc searches on its site, you can also integrate its product via API.

 Pipl Cons

• No data enrichment: You are at the mercy of Pipl’s databases, which could deliver flawed results if the information is stale.
• Opaque pricing: It is impossible to know how much Pipl will cost until you request a quote from its sales team.

ArkOwl Pros 

• Lightweight tool: ArkOwl isn’t the most complex or powerful fraud investigation tool, making it very easy to use.
• Flexible pricing: You can buy ArkOwl via a monthly subscription or pay-as-you-go based on your volume of API calls.

 ArkOwl Cons

• No IP data enrichment: Strangely, while you get social media lookups, ArkOwl doesn’t offer much in the way of IP analysis. 
• Limited social media checks: At the time of writing, ArkOwl checks seven social media sites. Not bad, but competitors offer more.