Device reputation firm iovation did some research and found that the online dating fraud rate originating from Europe grew 357% between Q1 2011 and Q1 2012.
The exact breakdown was:
Q1 2011 = .22
Q2 2011 = .50
Q3 2011 = .66
Q4 2011 = .73
Q1 2012 = 1.02
This is great news for iovation’s business model, while at the same time bad news for the online dating industry. The last thing it needs is more fraud, there’s plenty of it to go around already. I don’t know what the actual number of fraudulent activities was, but thats a pretty big jump.
While some larger, more savvy dating sites roll their own anti-fraud systems, the majority don’t have any anti-fraud protection in place at all. Active in the online community space for several years, iovation has a number of customers in the online dating space. I like their concept because it relies in part on a shared database of fraudulent devices, meaning that if a device has been tagged with a red flag, you’ll know that on your site the second they hit it and be able to head off the offender from the get-go. They have launched a new European data center as well, which means better, faster services for dating sites with a footprint in Europe. Plus then you can expense a trip to Amsterdam for business. More info.
“While some larger, more savvy dating sites roll their own anti-fraud systems…”
Smaller players like us have our own anti-fraud systems, too, you know:) We even got a healthy R&D subsidy from the Cdn gov’t for our solution. It cut down scammer infiltration by 95%. For the life of them, they can’t figure out how we are catching them. It’s a trade secret:)
Sam
What Fraud is this? Scammers, credit card fraudsters, false profiles?
Scamalytics API developed by RecSys.com uses multiple (including blacklists + real-time behavioural analysis) approaches to tackle this issue.
Happy to offer a free trial to anyone interested.
Regards
Nick Tsinonis
Recsys.com/scamalytics
Its quite extraordinary that scam and fraud is on the rise given all the new technology and investment dating sites are investing in detecting scams. The white label dating services provider that powers some of my sites have recently taken to manually verifying profiles, it has help them reduce fraud, I think their example is a beacon to the other dating sites to follow to combat fraud effectively.
I think the dating industry can come up some free to use collaborative services. Each site can push anonymized scammer data into the system and query back those data to see if there are any flagged actions related to those data on other sites. A standardized hashing mechanism could help us sort out the anonymization.
As long as people give money to total strangers (including beyond stupid things like wiring money to West Africa), there will always be attempts by scammers to relieve them of their hard-earned savings.
This is the battle we face: protecting our members from annoying messages from scammers – and protecting those minority of fools (from themselves) who keep the scammers employed.
Fortunately, in our case, we keep almost all of the scammers out. The ones who get through get caught quickly by our dedicated group of members-vounteers. Or, we catch them ourselves. Unfortunately, we cannot protect (100% of the time, anyway) those who insist on sending their money to these thieves.
Just as we are finding it hard to get into the dating game stuff like this comes along, is internet dating in trouble?
“As long as people give money to total strangers (including beyond stupid things like wiring money to West Africa), there will always be attempts by scammers to relieve them of their hard-earned savings.” — I completely agree with this statement. No amount of tools can prevent this.
Hmmm – is someone going to challenge Iovation’s method for research?
We haven’t seen any growth in scammers in that period and we’ve got over a third of the UK online dating market which is pretty significant in Europe. So I’d question where they’re getting their data from – are there many dating companies still using Iovation now? And if not, what is their dataset based on?
Scammers are a problem, but not to the extent their PR machine would have you believe.
Ross
See: http://www.iovation.com/press-release-042512/ linked to the article.
“The top three European countries for online fraud over the last year were Romania, Lithuania and Croatia according to iovation.”
I think that explains it … or part. Higher % detection doesn’t necessarily mean higher fraud. Their systems could have improved and they might have new clients/industries that operate in more fraud-heavy countries.
Headline a bit sensationalist … I guess PR agency did their job.