Are High-Security Checks Worth It?

by Florian Tanant
Email profiling is becoming more and more sophisticated. Today, we’ll see how it works, and how you can leverage its power to improve fraud detection.
Try our tool below for free to see what it can reveal about your email address:
Email profiling, or any kind of profiling done based on a single data point, relies on a process called data enrichment. Here are the basics, of what it is:
It is worth noting that data enrichment can be done manually. For instance, you could paste the email address into Google and see if any interesting results come up.
But of course, manual data enrichment is time consuming, difficult, and doesn’t really scale. Moreover, you might struggle to access certain databases, which is where a good fraud prevention tool can make all the difference.
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“…if you think about your own email address, it’s probably used to sign into a number of services, especially social media platforms. These are great places to investigate in order to validate the emails address usage.”
The first thing we will want to check is that the email address is real. This is done via:
However, it’s extremely easy to create disposable email addresses hosted on real servers. A quick Google search will bring up hundreds of temporary or throwaway email address services. You simply log on and use it like a regular email platform, but the address is only valid for a limited period of time.
Moreover, fraudsters can bulk buy large numbers of real email addresses from official platforms such as Gmail or Hotmail. Some can even match a person’s stolen ID name, to make it look more official.
So a search should also let you know the following:
Now if you think about your own email address, it’s probably used to sign into a number of services, especially social media platforms. These are great places to investigate in order to validate the emails address usage.
Then there are databases, both internal and external, useful for fraud prevention. So it’s important to check if the email address is associated with:
Last but not least, some subtle data points that can reveal a lot about an email address. They all have to do with the string of letters, numbers and characters used in the actual email address name.
All the data enrichment above is great, but if you have to manually check it, you still end up doing a lot of the hard work. Which is why a good email profiling solution should also generate insightful fraud scores designed to let you mitigate fraud risk yourself.
Essentially, these will speed up the review process for you. But if you were to manually generate them, it would be a complex and tedious task. Which is why at SEON, we let machine learning algorithms do the hard work.
By combining the power of AI-driven systems and clear, human-readable results, we believe companies large and small have more control over how they manage fraud on their platforms.
Yes – provided it complies with data protection regulations. Which is why the SEON Intelligence extension and Email modules only use open source databases to cross check information.
At SEON, we have a number of flexible solutions that can be tailored to the way you fight fraud. The chief way that you can use SEON’s email verification software capabilities to combat fraud is by running a user’s email address into the software’s social profile lookup function.
This allows you to view SEON’s results after it’s run an online check to see which, if any, social media/general online accounts the given email address is registered to. This can help you determine the extent to which the email address is either suspicious or trustworthy – with a non-existent online presence being the most dubious result. After all, how many people don’t at least have a Netflix profile nowadays?
An email address is a lot like a digital passport. Since 51% of internet users have kept theirs for more than 10 years, it’s easy enough to quickly confirm their identity. But like real passports, it’s easy to fake them.
Luckily, a good email analysis tool will put all the odds in your favour to intelligently detect suspicious email addresses. Combined with other tools such as device fingerprinting or IP analysis, it’s easy to see how fraudsters are increasingly hindered by SEON.
Working with SEON gives you complete user profiles in an instant, helping you to reduce fraud rates.
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Learn more about:
Browser Fingerprinting | Device Fingerprinting | Fraud Detection API | Fraud Detection with Machine Learning & AI
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Communication Specialist | Florian helps tech startups and global leaders organise their thoughts, find their voices, and connect with customers worldwide.
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