Online Banking: Security or Convenience?

I remember when I was a kid in the late 60s when my parents hauled me down to the local savings and loan at the market to open my very own savings account.  I still remember the feel of the green cloth cover on the 5 x 7 booklet that the smiling banker slid across [...]

Web Dating: Love, Sex, Money & Crime Online

I am blogging this while standing at the ThreatMetrix booth on the last day of iDate 2010 Miami Beach.  The online dating world is an interesting industry – a global industry comprised of many interconnected pieces.  The online dating world has all the essential ingredients to make a great story:  love, sex, money and crime [...]

Love Is Stopping Online Dating Scammers

The online dating world will converge in Miami in a few weeks at the annual iDate 2010 conference billed as “the largest industry gathering of the year” that covers all business aspects of the dating and social networking markets.   ThreatMetrix will be exhibiting at iDate in booth #506, if you’re attending the conference [...]

Without Device ID You’re as Safe as Your Password

Twitter me this:  When is Twitter not Twitter?  Answer: when it’s the Iranian Cyber Army.  Last week a simple password breach put Twitter out of commission for an hour or two while its servers were redirected to the Iranian Cyber Army.  It illustrates the thin ice we skate on at any given moment on the [...]

Dating fraud: scammers make the funny papers

Thankfully our comic strip illustrator Andy Warner returned from an extended break with a new episode in our ongoing cartoon series starring  two online fraudsters Gromyko and Natasha. Every comic tells a different story of web fraud through the schemes of these two determined cyber criminals.
The latest installment is based on the very real challenge [...]

CSI: Did fraud kill the online customer?

You don’t need a crime scene chalk outline to figure out why a customer left never to return to your web site to shop if the customer was victimized by fraud in a prior transaction.  According to the new 2009 LexisNexis® True Cost of Fraud Benchmark Study more than four in ten victims will avoid [...]

Eight reasons to use device identification

With 2010 just around the corner, it’s not too soon to be thinking about how to strengthen your online fraud detection capabilities. Whatever you’re doing today to defeat fraudsters and scammers can be more effective with device identification—whether you’re manually checking orders or using home-grown or off-the-shelf anti-fraud tools like case management or transaction monitoring. [...]

Gaming social games: virtual goods fraud

In case you haven’t heard, there’s real money in virtual goods—serious money. Of course the hard cash exchanges hands in the form of an online credit card transaction—and whenever lots of money, credit card purchases and millions of transactions come together on the Internet there’s online fraud.

Know your customer: device fingerprints streamline customer authentication

Which is more important: detecting a fraudster or authenticating a customer? Detecting fraud gets top billing in the news most of the time, but four years ago (an eternity in tech years) ComputerWorld’s Jay Cline put customer authentication front and center in an article titled “How to Build Privacy Into Customer Authentication.” Yesterday one of [...]

What does your computer say about you? Nothing personal if it’s a device fingerprint

I recently learned why identical twins have different fingerprints. In answering a reader’s question a NYT writer explained that the likely reason is “related to the minute differences in the mechanical forces each developing fetus experiences…as its cells proliferate.” In other words the uniqueness of human fingerprints stems from the physical forces that surround the [...]