Rippleshot Blog

Developing trust as a fraud analytics platform doesn’t happen overnight. Here at Rippleshot, we’ve been working for years to make our fraud platform more than just about the data science. We’re all about the people, too.

In a recent interview with Bizcast, our co-founder Canh Tran shared his perspective on what it takes to grow a startup in a rapidly-changing industry — while still delivering customer success through our people-centric model.

When Forbes published an article titled: "The battle against synthetic identity fraud is just beginning," it was clear this problem was becoming a widespread issue for financial institutions.

The past few years the chatter about credit card fraud has been all about the major data breaches at retail stores. The Equifax breach happened and the conversations began to evolve. It was reported that 145 million social security numbers, along with 209,000 credit card details were breached. Not to mention the millions of other sensitive personal details that were leaked. The chatter about synthetic identity fraud quickly gained traction.

Here at Rippleshot, this has been a topic we've been busy tracking. Recently, Our Co-Founder Canh Tran was at Trellance's Immersion 18 conference where he was interviewed for BIG Fintech's latest podcast. Tran dove into the latest Synthetic Fraud trends, and explained why this problem isn't going away anytime soon.

Fiserv, a global provider of financial services technology solutions, announced its partnership with Rippleshot to offer Card Risk Office℠ Fraud Warning, an early breach detection solution that allows financial institutions to identify potential fraud events 30-60 days prior to network alerts.

Across the payments ecosystem, fraud continues to be the increasingly complex and expensive problem that all financial institutions are attempting to tackle. To understand how payment fraud is evolving, FIs must identify the origin of the problem itself. 

A new report by Javelin dove into leading card fraud trends, the greatest threats to financial institutions and what strategies can help curb the rise of payment fraud. The report highlighted some core issues in the payment ecosystem and how these problems have transformed over the past year.

There’s never quite a dull moment in the world of credit card fraud, which was the case this week in the mainstream news cycle. With topics like “chip card scheme,” “fake fraud alerts” and “card shimming scam” in the headlines, it’s easy to see why banks are rushing to implement better, faster fraud detection solutions.

That was just a sliver of what made the headlines in the world of payment card fraud news this week. We’ve taken a deeper dive into the reports that surfaced, and have explored why these problems keep showing back up in the mainstream news cycle.

Synthetic fraud isn’t a new phenomenon, but with an increase of incidents across the fraud ecosystem — from credit card fraud to identity theft — this problem isn’t going away anytime soon.

In fact, it’s estimated that Synthetic ID fraud accounts for 85% of all identity fraud in the U.S., and continues to rise annually. A report from TransUnion reported that between 2016’s Q4 and 2017’s Q4, suspected synthetic fraud balances rose 5.2%. Collectively, this has become a $290 million problem.

It’s been a busy week in the world of financial institution regulation as headlines about Dodd-Frank, the Equifax breach, credit freezes and data security stole the spotlight. While these four topics have been at the forefront of the news cycle for many months, each of them found their way into the top news items.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s been happening in Washington, and how it may impact the world of financial services.

It’s no surprise that debit card fraud is on the rise, but what’s noteworthy is the rate at which this figure is increasing.

New data from FICO indicates the number of debit cards compromised in 2017 increased 10 percent from 2016. This figure refers to debit cards used at U.S. ATMs and merchant card readers. Compromises of ATMs and merchant devices rose 8 percent in the same time period.

When a data breach occurs, the full impact of the incident usually takes a few months to realize the potential impact. This has certainly been the case for the Equifax breach that was first discovered last summer. This week, the credit reporting agency announced that another 2.4 millions Americans were discovered to have been impacted by last year’s breach.

This is the second time the company has announced more affected consumers, bringing the estimated total impacted to roughly 147.9 million Americans. This is the largest data breach of personal information to date.

Since the fallout of the Equifax breach, the chatter in the financial services industry has been all about identity fraud. The same sentiment was echoed in a recent study by Javelin.

According to that study, for the first year ever, data breaches compromised more Social Security Numbers than credit card numbers. SSNs accounted for 35 percent, while credit card numbers rang in at 30 percent in breaches. The reason for this shift was attributed to the Equifax breach.

As predicted, with fraudsters’ techniques getting smarter, they are adapting quickly to different types of fraud. The big concern in the financial world around identity theft is the ability to commit synthetic identity fraud.

While the Equifax breach has dominated headlines about fears over credit card fraud and identity theft, there are many less widely-reported incidents that occur on a much more regular basis.

The real impact of financial fraud is its long-lasting effect once a consumer’s personal credentials are compromised. From tracking down where and when the fraud occurred, how much damage was done, and what other records may have been breached, credit card fraud presents plenty of expensive headaches for both cardholders and issuers.

But where do the most credit card and identity theft risks exist? A new report from Reward Expert analyzed data from the the  the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Report and complaints filed with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to determine which states are considered the most ‘at-risk’ for these types of fraud. Here’s what the report concluded.

The roller coaster price fluctuations of bitcoin has kept the cryptocurrency prevalent in the headlines for months. This week, bitcoin made it to the list of credit card fraud concerns, with — as you can probably guess — stolen identities being the root of the problem.

A LA Times article explored the chief concerns around cryptocurrency scams and why banks are getting increasingly skeptical about bitcoin transactions. To start, major banks have reportedly said they will decline transactions that involve customers using credit cards to buy bitcoin. The concern here is that borrows will avoid paying for those bitcoins, particularly if they buy high and bitcoin's price plunges. But the credit risk fears from financial institutions goes far beyond simple purchases of the cryptocurrency itself.

Thanks to more sophisticated fraud detection and prevention technologies, banks are getting better at stopping fraud attempts. A new report from the American Bankers Association revealed that banks were able to stop $17 billion in fraud attempts in 2016.

What that means, according to the 2017 American Bankers Association Deposit Account Fraud Survey Report, is that banks were able to prevent $9 out of $10 attempted deposit account fraud in 2016. In response to the rapidly-growing sophisticated fraud schemes, banks are integrating more technologies in order to enhance their customer protection measures. Typically, this means smarter security software, and newer technology innovations like platforms that rely on machine learning capabilities and data analytics to detect fraud faster and more accurately. 

When discussions about fraud, payments and security arise, you won't get long into a conversation before machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) come into the mix.

Through the application of high-performance software, machine learning technology has created advanced computing abilities that have a broad-scale reach for community banks that allow them to better compete against the bigger banks. This has created a new reality for issuers looking to enhance their fraud detection tools beyond basic what's readily available in the marketplace today.

As a fraud analytics firm that leverages machine learning technology to better predict and stop the spread of fraud from compromised card details, you could say we’re already pretty bullish about the future of machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI) and its ability to transform the world of fraud detection.

Just ask our team of data scientists if you need more evidence. But you don’t have to take our word for it — there’s plenty of others across the industry echoing the same sentiment. It’s clear machine learning and AI have officially become the trend to watch in 2018.