%201%20(1).png)
Fraud detection and prevention is a critical activity in any organisation, especially those in the financial industry. Many solutions exist to help mitigate the risk to a business.
Fraudsters take many forms like opening many accounts to claim promotion codes, paying for goods using stolen credit card details, chargeback requests for received goods, or triangulation fraud. The true cost of these crimes can be sizable for a business. Companies lose money in the form of lost customers, refunds/chargebacks and even compliance fines if they aren’t up to date with industry standards.
This article will discuss the best fraud detection APIs on the market today and why they could be of interest to you if your business operates in the financial or ecommerce space.
When To Use a Fraud Prevention API?
The right time to use a fraud prevention API is when a user takes an important step in your product or service journey. An important step could be a sale, creating a new account, logging into an existing account, updating credit card details, etc. A fraud prevention API can automatically assign a risk score to the user based on their actions, allowing you to understand in real time if your business is at risk of fraudulent activity.
Top 13 Fraud Detection APIs
1. IPQualityScore
IPQualityScore has a collection of fraud detection and prevention tools that enable bot detection and user screening to identify fake accounts, fraudulent payments, chargebacks, & malicious users without interrupting business processes.
IPQualityScore’s suite of tools include Bot Detection, Proxy & VPN Detection, Email Validation, Device Fingerprinting, and User & Transaction Scoring tools. With their API, the services can easily integrate with many platforms in minutes.
Boasting real-time fraud scoring your organisation is protected before any negative impact is felt. With over 25 risk analysis data points (including IP address or device, email address, phone number, or complete billing details) you can feel safe that your customers are who they claim to be.
2. Personator API
Run by Melissa Global Intelligence, the Personator API is a one of a kind verification and enrichment API that leverages a comprehensive set of data points to protect businesses against fraud, The API can scrub and verify U.S. and Canadian contact data, corroborate supplied contact data points (name, address, phone, email), and ensure customer data is legitimate.
Their powerful API leverages USPS CASS/DPV and Canada Post SERP Certified logic for address validation. But as you can guess the downside to the product is that it is only available for US and Canadian businesses.
If you are looking to verify organisation address formats to reduce typing mistakes, Melissa offers an address verification service also that can minimise customer and business frustrations.
3. Social Scanner API
Social Scanner has a powerful fraud detection API that works by scanning social media platforms for suspicious activity, such as fake profiles, and reviews, linked to your business. They scan 996 social media websites when provided with usernames. When it finds anything suspicious, it will alert your business to take action. What’s more, you can uncover suspicious activity and quickly scan any fake/bot accounts that are laundering on social media networks.
The tool also allows you to keep track of what users are saying about you online. It uses AI to analyse text for fraudulent content. By monitoring any negative reviews and mentions of your business, Social Scanner can help protect your reputation and stop the spread of misinformation.
4. Signifyd
Signifyd claims to help their customers approve 5-7% more orders when using their API or solutions. They protect their customers and shoppers by recognising the true intent behind every payment online. Their device fingerprinting solution tracks and identifies behaviours used by customers and fraudsters that are attempting to make transactions on your site.
Signifyd’s aim is to give clients confidence to scale automation of payments without worrying about fraudulent payments. They leverage machine learning models to examine identity and intent insights so they can score payments with unparalleled accuracy.
Signifyd offers a suite of useful tools that can have a positive impact on your business. For instance, the Chargeback Recovery services offer tremendous ROI and their constant monitoring stops fraudulent activity in real-time.
5. SEON. Fraud Fighters
Using automated, machine-driven workflows, SEON provides fraud managers with a complete all-in-one solution that integrates effortlessly into their platform. SEON API furnishes you with diverse data points to help you create a fraud detection strategy that is flexible and in-depth.
Perfect for businesses looking for Anti-Money laundering (AML) or Know Your Customer (KYC) services, SEON uses behavioural analytics to identify basic and advanced fraudulent activities. Features they boast include bespoke risk scores, digital and social platform lookups, and behavioural analytics.
Aiming to uncover fraud patterns and increase revenue opportunities, SEON’s fraud API gives customers insights into every interaction, transaction, and opportunity for their business.
6. ClearSale
Claiming to be the world’s best ecommerce fraud detection solution, ClearSale is committed to helping their customers identify possible fraud so they can sell more and make better customer experiences. They do this through combining advanced statistical technology with a large team of specialised fraud analysts to deliver the lowest false decline rates among fraud detection companies.
Their Device Fingerprint code collects and analyses public information about a user’s device and the activity on it. By using this, it is possible to identify whether the user is already known to ClearSale, through their previous transactions and schemes.
The ClearSale API works on all major ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Prestashop and many more.
7. Riskified
Riskified is a risk management platform built for e-commerce businesses. It helps them to build trusted relationships with their customers by accurately identifying the individuals behind each online interaction with the business.
Riskified’s machine learning technology makes accurate, automated decisions about each customer based on aggregated data sourced from a network of many of the world’s largest online merchants, creating a compounding network effect which is leading to more sales for businesses and less friction for customers.
On top of point-of-sale fraud protection, Riskified also provides protection against malicious account takeovers and helps merchants to block abuse of their platform, thereby enabling businesses to onboard the right customers in an efficient and cost effective manner.
8. Sift
For a more rounded fraud prevention solution, Sift provides a holistic digital trust and safety platform with passwordless authentication, account defence, payment protection, dispute management and content integrity. This end-to-end solution may prove more suitable for a digital onboarding experience than a competing single purpose platform.
Rather than focusing on a single niche, such as e-commerce for example, Sift tailors their API for all industries including fintech, marketplaces, travel and hospitality and many more.
The underlying ethos behind Sift’s fraud prevention is that users are innocent until proven guilty - which bodes well for their focus on the customer experience and Sift’s ability to keep bad actors out of your business while ensuring well intending customers are not unnecessarily turned away either through rejection or a complicated user experience.
9. Eye4Fraud
Eye4Fraud empowers e-commerce businesses to break free from the risk and hassle of fraudulent purchase orders through its fraud detection API.
In use cases where customers take the approach of automatically turning down high value orders out of fear of fraud, Eye4Fraud seeks to turn that approach on its head, allowing businesses to accept every single order and to feel secure about doing so. Thus dramatically reducing the number of valid, high value orders that would otherwise be rejected for no good reason.
Eye4Fraud is a great option for those who would like a more hands on relationship with their fraud prevention solution provider as they are known for their high standards in customer service. Clients enjoy access to a dedicated customer account manager and no extra charges for integration configurations.
10. CertifID
CertifID’s fraud detection software protects businesses and customers from wire fraud. The company’s founders have first hand experience of a devastating wire fraud, having been duped out of $185,000. This exposed the urgent need for a strong and accessible identity validation solution when transferring money and to this day fuels CertifID’s mission against fraudsters.
If your digital onboarding experience requires customers to share their bank details, CertifID is well worth your consideration. On top of providing a smooth experience for customers through their digital solutions, both parties in the transaction can feel protected by CertifID’s direct insurance of up to $1 million on every transaction.
11. Kount
Kount provides solutions for digital identity verification and ecommerce fraud prevention. They were acquired in 2021 by Equifax (one of the world’s largest consumer credit reporting agencies), adding a tremendous amount of clout to Kount’s brand.
Their advanced AI provides protection against new and existing fraud threats. The company uses both supervised and unsupervised machine learning technology which is informed and trained by signal data from an extensive global network of payment processors, card networks and fraud analysts. All of this consolidated signal data helps to ensure a high level of accuracy in Kount’s automated fraud detection.
12. DataDome
Data Dome provides protection for websites, apps and APIs against account takeovers, scraping, denial of service, card cracking, credential stuffing, server overload, fake account creation and vulnerability scanning. With a high focus on speed, the company’s fraud detection algorithm is fed with 3 trillion signals per day and offers real-time analysis with 99,99% accuracy. All this without adding latency to your website or app, thereby providing security for the business at no cost to the customer’s experience.
Within its fraud prevention solution, Data Dome specialises in protecting against bot-driven online fraud. They are a strong option for fraud detection within a digital onboarding journey as the company has designed its verification solution to have as close to zero impact on the legitimate customer’s experience as possible. Behavioural detection technology as well as customised CAPTCHA protect customers and businesses while ensuring a low ‘false-positive’ rate of 0.01% or below.
13. Prove
Prove claims to be the world’s most accurate identity verification and authentication platform. The company aims to remove friction in customer experiences in the digital economy by providing mobile centred fraud mitigation solutions. For digital onboarding specifically, Prove Pre Fill places user authentication right at the beginning of the customer sign up process, by sourcing verifiable information about a potential customer and pre-filling an application form thereby saving the customer time and mitigating the risk to the business.
Prove’s proprietary identity verification solution, the aptly named Prove Identity, sets itself apart from other identity verification solutions in that it does not require selfies or documents to be scanned and uploaded. Instead, it can verify a customer's details (including name, social security number, address, date of birth and email) using just a phone number. All this while also providing a ‘risk score’ for the potential client.
If an API is what you need, Prove has many available to help you set up a customised fraud detection process for digital onboarding. Various categories of APIs are provided to determine possession, reputation, and ownership.
What are fraud detection APIs?
Fraud detection APIs enable businesses to identify and flag fraudulent activities. They are used to detect behaviours such as unusual payment patterns or large transactions, which can help protect businesses from incurring significant costs. Fraud detection APIs can also provide businesses with insights on their customers’ behaviour, allowing them to better understand the risks associated with certain types of transactions.
Who needs fraud detection tools?
Fraud detection tools are a must-have for all businesses, regardless of size or sector. The cost of fraud can be huge — not just in terms of financial losses but also damage to the brand. Investing in the right tool to prevent this from happening is essential. Fraudsters are getting increasingly sophisticated in their methods, meaning manual checks simply won’t suffice anymore; automated processes that use AI-driven analytics engines have become necessary to detect fraudulent behaviour.
How are fraudulent transactions detected?
Fraudulent transaction detection has four main steps:
- User data is collected
- A fraud detection system enriches and processes the data
- The system will assign a risk score to each user
- The business decides whether to approve, decline, or manual review user actions
