3 ms·

What's your anti-fraud strategy?

• sabalaba 16y ago
  There's essentially two major types of fraud that could occur with this system that we've thought of. 1) Seller fraud, bogus items, imprecise descriptions, etc. This is relatively easily prevented with our reputation system as it stands. A user will less likely to buy if a seller has a negative reputation, and hopefully that provides enough of an economic incentive to prevent seller fraud. 2) Money laundering (Malicious Molly creates two dummy accounts and makes a purchase on one and moves the money towards the other) This is a big one. One of the things we were thinking about regarding this is to analyze payments and see if there is suspicious activity (multiple recently or nearly registered accounts all making purchases around the same time/date range and then the money being pulled out would be a strong sign that the behavior was money laundering. But that's more of a payment system problem. 3) Buyer chargeback fraud (Malicious Mark makes a purchase, receives the download, and then calls his credit card company up to reverse the payment. Mark has the good, the payment gets reversed (it's difficult to dispute digital goods) and Mark has the money & the product. There's not much that can be done with this one from a technological point of view, however, we have considered creating a user reputation system that could let sellers rate buyers' behavior. The reputation itself is vulnerable to a sybil attack, but that vulnerability is a yet unsolved problem (if we are to maintain the ease of use in creating an account).