Email Address Fraud Prevention Strategies

Using Email Address Signals For Fraud Prevention

Organizations can enable email address fraud prevention and strengthen their customer relationships by implementing a multi-layered approach to identity verification and email risk assessment. A valid email address is typically required when clients register for a new account with most businesses. However, it would be great to have more information about that email address and use that information to detect fraud, wouldn't it? By deploying a complete email address reputation system that instantly scrutinizes an email address for patterns that indicate fraud, organizations can obtain even more insight into an individual during an identity verification process.

Email address fraud prevention helps companies mitigate abuse and block malicious behavior in real-time. With the rise of digital channels for consumers, your ability to assess risk associated with digital elements has never been more critical. This is especially true if your company, like so many others these days, tries to limit the amount of personal identity information it collects in order to speed up new customer onboarding and reduce data exposure risk. Maintaining seamless and frictionless customer interactions while preventing fraud necessitates multiple layers of defense. The right tools can help you reduce fraud in your business. You can use email as an early fraud prevention tool.

What Is The Value Of a Customer Email Address?

Customers' email addresses may be requested by businesses and financial institutions for a variety of reasons. Using an email address as a means of detecting, stopping, and, if necessary, escalated fraud prevention measures for a potentially problematic transaction. Fraudsters attempt to gain access to products, services, and accounts by utilizing email addresses that don't exist, originate from high-risk countries, belong to disposable email services, or have been linked to previous fraudulent transactions. It is possible for firms to acquire a better knowledge of the transaction and decrease fraud by using third parties for email analytics.

Fraud prevention services like IPQS are able to detect red flags and determine whether an email is fraudulent based on reputation signals around the email's activity including the domain's quality. Fraud detection services employ predictive analytics and information on fraud patterns to help businesses with the verification process. Leveraging partnerships with mail service providers, fraud prevention services can confirm the legitimacy of an address in real-time, making email address analytics critical for developing a comprehensive identity verification system. In addition, organizations can gain more decision-making power during the verification process when they combine additional identity factors like website bot detection.

Email Address Fraud Detection Indicators

Numerous indicators in email addresses can help identify or predict fraudulent payments, chargebacks, and abusive behaviors like bots, spam, and fake users.

• Excessive Length or Very Short Addresses — Most people can tell when an email address is too short, but if you need help, most domains have email address length rules.
• Random Numbers or Letters — Real email addresses tend to have names or words, so an excessive amount of numbers (especially at the end of the email handle) can be a good indicator that the email address was bot generated, usually in bulk quantities.
• Matching Multiple Emails To Similar Identity Data — In two-factor authentication, fraudulent emails frequently include the same disposable phone number or even the same name. IPQS can prevent fraudulent phone numbers using our real-time phone number validation service.
• Duplicate Passwords — The chances of having the same password for multiple email addresses are almost non-existent, however this can occur for common passwords such as "12345", etc. Fraudsters commonly use the same password to gain easy access to these accounts in the future.
• Analyzing Email Address Age — Knowing the age of an email address can be a great signal as newly created accounts have a 90% chance of being a fraudulent user. Additionally, IPQS provides real-time email age and domain age statistics using intelligent domain risk scoring.
• Checking Usage and Activity — Taking advanced metrics a step further, wouldn't it be great to know how frequently an email address is used online? Email Address Fraud Detection by IPQS provides activity levels for any email address worldwide.
• Disposable Email Address Detection — Detect disposable email addresses with up to date blacklists that detect even the newest temporary email services frequently used by fraudsters.
• Validating Email Status — Quickly determine if an email address is truly active and able to receive email with industry leading email address validation.

What Is Email Address Fraud Prevention?

Email address fraud detection uses reputation signals around a customer's email address to identify suspicious behavior and bad actors. This is where a collaborative fraud platform and the rest of your identity verification solution come into play. By identifying fraud and risk indicators, organizations can immediately identify accounts or transactions that need to be escalated to a higher degree of verification. Email risk assessment can also improve the rate of automatic account validation resulting in less friction for authentic consumers and a better user experience.

Improving Email Risk Assessment

Security begins with verifying a consumer's identity and assessing risk at multiple customer touchpoints, such as account opening, account maintenance, changing passwords, and initiating online transactions. By evaluating email address metadata points such as domain details, email activity, risk indicators, and other personally identifiable information, a precise risk score can be created to accurately match the user's intentions. On average, email address fraud detection can lead to a 73% improvement in identifying abuse. This rate multiplies greatly when paired with other services like IP address reputation.

Unique Risk Identifiers

As part of your organization's fraud and identity management strategy, email addresses are ideal for identifying customer risk. More importantly, it's a one-of-a-kind global identifier that allows for digital engagement and transactions across all industries because it is:

• Emails are used in almost every single online transaction.
• Transaction history and behavior are abundant.
• It's difficult to change because it connects to all of a person's online accounts.
• 93% of users have been using the same email address for more than two years, and 68% have been using the same email address for more than five years.

To wrap it up, email addresses can be extremely useful in detecting and preventing fraud. Email addresses contain a great deal of behavior and history data that is ideal for fraud detection. When someone uses an email address, a deep behavior trail is left behind. These traces reveal unique behavioral patterns over time, which can be used to assess transaction risk. Your company likely already collects email addresses for accounts and payments, so now you can use this data to detect and prevent fraud while providing your customers with a seamless experience.