Verifi Inc., a provider of risk-management services for card-not-present merchants, this week announced a partnership with ThreatMetrix Inc. designed to help block online fraud.
The partnership enables Verifi, which serves merchants with higher-risk transactions, such as those involving virtual currency for online games, concert tickets and jewelry, to gain access to ThreatMetrix’s fraud-detection tools and its global database of fraudulent customers to more easily identify good and returning customers.
“Basically, ThreatMetrix locates a collective problem of fraudsters and provides Verifi with a collective solution,” Alisdair Faulkner, chief products officer of Los Altos, Calif.-based ThreatMetrix, tells PaymentsSource.
ThreatMetrix provides an “additional protective layer” against hackers, cyber-criminals and large-scale fraud enterprises without disrupting transactions, Verifi said in a statement.
And while no one knows whether an online consumer is a fraudster, Faulkner says, one common link often is the computer. For example, if a retailer gets 1,000 transactions within minutes, ThreatMetrix is able to identify whether the IP addresses were spoofed, Faulkner says. If each spoofed address is linked back to one main computer, then it’s not a transaction the merchant can trust, he explains.
ThreatMetrix is able to help some e-commerce merchants reduce their fraud burden by about 50%-75%. However, results usually depend on how much fraud a merchant experienced before integrating ThreatMetrix technology, Faulkner says.