Curious about how much information you can uncover from an email address? SEON’s powerful search tool can scan over 90 social and digital platforms to reveal insightful details about the email’s owner.
Read on to learn how this process works and how it can enhance your business’s security and awareness.
How to Find Social Media from Just an Email Address
Social media platforms like Twitter (X), Facebook, and LinkedIn, along with services like GitHub, Netflix, and Airbnb, often make some of their data public. Simply having an account on these platforms provides useful information, known as social data, which is accessible through open-source intelligence (OSINT).
Tools and techniques, such as SEON’s, can aggregate and filter this social data to uncover details about the email owner, including:
- full name
- gender
- age
- location
- avatar picture
- registration details
Experience top-notch fraud detection and customer insights with SEON’s digital footprint analysis of 90+ social and digital profiles. Sign up for a free trial to explore the power of enriched data.
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How to Use SEON’s Social Media Lookup to Fight Fraud
SEON integrates social media profiling into its email verification and phone analysis APIs. Our reverse email check enriches data based on an email address alone, efficiently flagging potential fraudsters at the onboarding stage before they can register on your website.
This method improves the user experience by requiring minimal primary data points, benefiting legitimate customers. You can integrate our Email API directly into your platform without any hassle.
SEON’s tool searches over 90 platforms and social networks to assess users’ trustworthiness. Genuine customers usually have a wider social media presence, making it easier to spot risks. Additionally, it filters out mass-generated emails used for fraud, catching unsophisticated attacks instantly.
Is Social Media Lookup Legal?
Yes, as long as the data you source is in public, open databases.
This is particularly important if you are in Europe and need to remain compliant with the GDPR. SEON’s solution, for instance, is fully GDPR compliant, and there is also an API to help your company purge data when required: the Erase API.
Limitations of Working with Social Data
Social data may sometimes be outdated, incomplete, or fake. Data accuracy can be a challenge with one in four people having a fake social media profile. In addition, fraudsters may use real stolen data to create synthetic identities, which must be filtered out for effective profiling.
Despite these challenges, social data is highly effective for fraud detection. While creating fake email addresses is easy, replicating a legitimate social media presence is more difficult and doesn’t scale well for multiple fraudulent accounts.
If no social media data exists, it indicates a higher risk, prompting the use of additional fraud prevention methods like device fingerprinting and velocity checks. Social media data can also expose identity theft if it doesn’t match other user information.
Case Study: Leveraging Digital Footprinting to Assess Creditworthiness
Digital footprinting offers an innovative way to assess creditworthiness and prevent fraud, especially in countries with limited traditional credit histories. By leveraging social signals and behavioral data, it evaluates affordability and detects fraud using minimal information, like an email address. This approach is crucial for over 1.4 billion unbanked adults worldwide, including 7.1 million households in the US.
Sun Finance, a leading online loan company, uses SEON to improve onboarding and debt collection. SEON’s email analysis and social media profiling verify identities and detect fraud. Exposed variables help predict loan defaults, while the flexible scoring system facilitates customer segmentation and manual reviews without adding friction for other applicants.
Discover how SEON helped Sun Finance enhance their credit risk assessments and reduce fraud with social and digital signals.
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By calculating a risk score based on social media presence and digital footprint, you can decide whether to take additional security measures for high-risk users or smoothly onboard low-risk ones. Once validated, you can further investigate their social profiles for more information.
Email Address Lookup & Social Data: A Winning Combo
Whether you’re manually checking a single account or automating data enrichment, combining email profiling with social media analysis is a robust tool for businesses. It helps you better understand your users, make informed decisions with limited data, and protect against chargebacks and defaulting customers.
FAQ
Yes. Through the use of OSINT tools, you can uncover a range of social media accounts via one single email address submitted by a user/customer. This can be used as an extra form of verification.
Certain tools are free. However, you will often find these have limited capabilities. Find out more about what tools are available on the market, both free and paid, in our reverse email lookup tool article.
This varies depending on the tool that you’re using. For example, SEON’s reverse social media lookup tool shows data from over 90 platforms and apps.
You might also be interested in reading about:
Learn more about:
Browser Fingerprinting | Device Fingerprinting | Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning
Sources
- DMA: Three reasons you should look again at your email campaigns
- Entrepreneur: One in Four People Have a Fake Social Media Profile Somewhere
