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by Gergo Varga
I remember when I started in the industry as a risk manager – over a decade ago, when people still used MySpace! – what floored me was not the long list of acronyms to learn or the complexity of online payment systems.
It was the sheer amount of fraud.
Of course I knew about hackers and scammers. But online commerce was still far from what it is today, and yet the fraudsters were already everywhere.
It was as if I had glanced at a whole new world – one which was hidden, with the majority of the population being blissfully unaware of it, up until the point that they themselves fall victim to it.
Working in this industry makes you see the world differently, much like how metro workers see the city differently from ordinary commuters.
There are of course hard skills that you can learn but at the end of the day, you’re under the hood of the global ecommerce machine. Complex systems stand between you and the real world, and your job is to try to understand that human story on the other side.
All the signs, data points and picked-up information are just pieces of a puzzle.
The hard part is that you still have to make sense of the picture once you put it together. And what we call stories in the real world are nothing more than patterns when shown on a screen. A given case will be judged according to what pattern it fits, in the head of the analyst.
Back in those days, you could only learn new patterns by shadowing more senior people or discovering them on your own.
These days, thankfully, there are many resources that you can use to build up your knowledge. While fraud and risk management has its own domain knowledge related to payments, regulation, and compliance, it’s adjacent to cybersecurity, which has a large and mature community.
The more technically inclined anti-fraud people frequently transfer to security. The fact that both careers have paranoia practically as a job requirement certainly helps.
Below, I’ve collated some of our favorite sources of knowledge and information. The list is by no means exhaustive – there are many more out there. But it’s a good starting point.
The ability to spot patterns is not something that can be picked up from a handbook; it’s more of a mentality that you learn via osmosis. An eager fraud fighter is someone who submerges themselves into this world.
Infrequent activity on these sites means you have to grab your RSS reader or check on them every once in a while – or just spend an afternoon or two going through the archives. They range from industry publications to veritable influencers but if it’s newsworthy and concerns us, it will appear here.
Association of Certified Fraud Examiners
Podcasts cast a wider net and as such, they deal with less techy stuff, focusing more on the story – as is the tradition of oral storytelling. The closest to what we have as an industry water cooler chat.
Now ye enter the land of wizards: the hacker community proper. The archives of these channels are worth digging through, as some of these talks and events are legendary. As a fraud/risk manager, you can only get so far in understanding what’s possible, while the hackers will always be there to tell us that there is in fact no spoon, Neo.
You know. Forums. Lurk more.
If we’ve missed something you feel is important, or if you spot something cool that belongs on this list, feel free to throw us a message on any of our social channels!
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Gergo Varga is SEON’s Product Evangelist. With more than 10+ years of experience in the Hungarian and international risk management sphere, he has developed an astute knowledge of RiskOps and Open Source Intelligence. He is the author of SEON’s Fraud Prevention for Dummies guide.
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