Online dating apps and websites have become a hotbed for digital fraud and romance scams. Attackers are exploiting vulnerable users to leave them emotionally and financially broke. With high ROI potential for romance scams, dating platforms are looking for new approaches where traditional bot and fraud prevention are failing to stop fraudsters getting onto their platform.
Online dating platforms make it convenient for singles to search for partners and are becoming increasingly popular due to their ease of use and simple onboarding processes. Often, all it takes for consumers to start using these platforms is to create an account with an email address and upload a few pictures.
This simple onboarding is, unfortunately, also opening entry gates for fraudsters who target communication channels to play with the emotions of unsuspecting consumers for monetary gain. In recent times, the menace of dating scams has increased so much that Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) issued a purple notice to its members warning about the ongoing romance scams on dating apps.
According to our Q2 2022 State of Fraud and Account Security Report, there was a five-fold increase in human-driven attacks on dating platforms from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022. Why aren’t cybercriminals using bots to perpetuate their scams, like they do on other platforms? It’s because interacting with other users and responding to messages requires more nuanced human capabilities, and while bots are more intelligent than ever, they’re not yet to the level where they can mimic actual human interactions.
Attackers target a popular dating platform for romance scams
Attackers use intelligent bots in conjunction with human click farms for account takeover attacks – to facilitate phishing and scamming – and new fake account origination. They also leverage the latest spoofing techniques to evade detection.
One of the world’s most popular dating platforms was facing a similar challenge. It was inundated with fraudulent new accounts, which attackers used to spam and abuse genuine consumers. Attackers were freely taking over user accounts and abusing dormant accounts to escape detection. These attacks disrupted the user experience and resulted in consumer dissatisfaction.
Given its outstanding reputation, the company could not afford to let attackers degrade the user experience on its online dating platforms. It was using reCAPTCHA to stop bad actors, but the issues persisted. Consumers were disgruntled, and the company knew they had to make a change. They approached Arkose Labs and implemented our solution to detect bad actors in real-time.
Using Arkose Labs, the company reduced fraud by 80%
With Arkose Labs, the company was able to reduce fraudulent activity by more than 80% when compared with the CAPTCHA solution it used earlier. The ability to detect attacks early in the process enabled the company to stop downstream spam and abuse, thereby ensuring consumers’ account security and providing a safe online environment for consumers to engage and interact with each other.
The data shared by the Arkose Labs platform played a major role in helping the team detect bot and human fraud behaviors. The company’s product manager said, “Using Arkose Labs data, we saw double digit improvement week over week in the number of registrations we were able to identify as fraudulent. We can identify and shadow ban malicious users to stop them from abusing our users, which makes the platform safer and increases trust.” In fact, Arkose Labs helped them catch 80% of the fraudsters before they could send out messages to genuine users.
The company was also able to maximize revenue generation opportunities as the Arkose Labs platform did not block any incoming user, who could’ve been a potential paying customer.
Further, unlike reCAPTCHA which frustrated the users, the Arkose Labs platform did not treat consumers on par with attackers, nor did it use the same yardstick to assess every incoming user. Instead, using targeted friction, it accurately identified and stopped attackers to maintain a great user experience and ensure consumers can continue with their digital journeys unhindered. With Arkose Labs, less than 5% of genuine consumers encountered challenges which meant reduced disruption for a majority of the legitimate users and the company was able to improve good user throughput by 12%.
To learn how Arkose Labs can help fortify the defenses of your digital platform while maintaining a great user experience, book a demo now.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Arkose Labs authored by Richard Dufty. Read the original post at: https://www.arkoselabs.com/blog/premier-dating-platform-reduces-fraud-by-80-with-arkose-labs/
