Introduction 

Consumers benefit immensely from the unprecedented convenience and accessibility online financial services afford them. But the two inherent benefits delivered by online financial services also cultivate two significant threats that can irreparably damage businesses like yours: payment fraud and account takeovers (ATOs).

Unless you can proactively and effectively detect and prevent these menaces, they can quickly and dramatically degrade customers’ trust in and loyalty to your organization — and send your customer satisfaction and revenue into a tailspin.

Fortunately, device identification technology can help you counteract the growing danger payment fraud and ATOs pose to your business. But only if you choose your device ID solution wisely. 

Account takeovers — exploding in value, magnitude, and severity 

Account takeovers are a prevalent problem. And it’s quickly getting much, much worse.

• 22% of U.S. adults have been a victim of an ATO. 
• The number of ATO attacks increased by 307% from 2019 to 2021. 
• Account takeovers caused businesses to lose $11. 4 billion in 2021. 
  Source: SpyCloud

That’s because fraudsters continually become more creative about hiding their true identities. Repeat malicious actors, for instance, often conceal their identities by:

• Changing it frequently
• Browsing while in incognito mode
• Exploiting privacy and cookie-blocking browser settings 
• Exploiting operating system tools
• Using VPNs and private relays

Some even go so far as to create sophisticated, custom tools!

This is why attempting to prevent ATOs and payment fraud the traditional way — by only using cookies, local storage, and/or IP addresses to identify return visitors — no longer works.

Device identification — a better approach for preventing ATOs and payment fraud

Today, preventing ATOs and payment fraud requires you to accurately identify the actual device each customer uses to access their account. 

But even that recommended approach isn’t a straightforward or guaranteed path to successful ATO/payment fraud prevention. That’s because identifying devices is hard — and getting more complicated every day — due to:

• Constantly changing browsers, browser standards, and operating systems
• Third-party cookie deprecation
• Restricted access to mobile device IDs
• Changes to user agent signals
• The growing use of VPNs
• An increasingly complex regulatory environment

To prevent ATOs and payment fraud with device identification, experts need technology that provides “richer” intelligence instead of just raw signals — actionable insights they can leverage to efficiently and effectively prevent the ATO fraud that becomes increasingly sophisticated every day.

And that’s precisely what the Fingerprint Device Intelligence Platform does.

Fingerprint device intelligence — the only solution with 99.5% accuracy 

With Fingerprint's Device Intelligence Platform, you can keep your customers' accounts safe by identifying ATO and payment fraud threats — with up to 99.5% accuracy — before they cause damage. 

Fingerprint's Device Intelligence Platform collects all its raw device signals for each customer device, then uses a proprietary formula to process those signals into one unique identifier — a device ID.

In addition to device IDs, Fingerprint’s incognito mode detection also ferrets out untrusted website visitors, requiring them to provide additional authentication before accessing their accounts.

For instance, when you integrate your authentication engine with Fingerprint’s device IDs, you can quickly and easily identify and then act upon every login attempt in the following ways: 

• New users/new device IDs/incognito visitors – Require them to complete two-factor authentication to access their accounts. 
• Rightful users – Permit these trusted users to bypass two-factor authentication and immediately access their accounts.

Bad actors/fraudsters – Block them at the login point before they can do any damage.

Conclusion

Three irrefutable truths persist about ATOs and payment fraud:

1. Anyone can be a victim.
2. The fraud landscape, user behaviors, and regulatory environments change every day.
3. A stable and persistent device ID can be an invaluable cornerstone to protecting your users — and your business.

But only the most accurate, resilient device IDs — like those from Fingerprint — can effectively stop ATOs and payment fraud. That’s because they’re the only ones that enable you to quickly, accurately, and proactively detect and prevent suspicious behavior, save time and money, and preserve your brand’s reputation.