About Headout

Headout is home to the world’s best real-life experiences - from expert-led tours to incredible landmarks, activities, events, and everything in between. Its mission is to inspire people to get up and close with the world we live in by building the most seamless and affordable booking platform. So far, Headout has served more than 20 million guests from 196 countries across 81 destinations and is available in seven languages.

The Challenge 

The fraud team at Headout faced payment fraud through card-not-present transactions and, as a result, chargebacks from affected customers. Bad actors were using stolen credit card details to purchase tickets to high-value experiences and selling them for a fraction of the cost elsewhere.  

Network-level payment fraud

Headout had a hunch that most of the stolen credit cards were coming from a similar group of devices with specific parameters but could never confirm the devices or fraud network with their current solution. Experience tickets were purchased rapidly and quickly sold for a fraction of the price to liquidate the stolen tickets. Headout would only be aware of the fraud at a much later date when the original cardholder would reach out or their bank reported it. 

Consequences of chargebacks

Victims of stolen credit cards used to purchase experiences on Headout would file for chargebacks to get their money back, and in addition to having to refund these payments directly affecting Headout’s bottom line, a high chargeback rate results in monthly fines, additional fees, and a potential loss of processing privileges. 

Reputational damage

Aside from financial losses due to fraud, stolen credit card usage can negatively impact your brand. Customers are less likely to continue shopping on a website or with a company that has a reputation for instances of credit card fraud. 

Removal of certain products

Specific experiences Headout offered were highly targeted by bad actors, given how quickly advantageous users could flip the tickets. With no effective way to prevent fraudulent purchases, Headout had to disable some of their best-selling experiences temporarily. 

Why Fingerprint

Headout knew they needed to change their current fraud detection and prevention. One of their main goals was to figure out a way to detect fraud at the earliest possible point so they could prevent high chargeback volumes and gain more insight into devices associated with repeat offenders of fraud. 

With Fingerprint, Headout started analyzing devices and flagging suspicious behavior in real time. As they continued to collect information about visitors and their devices, they recognized a pattern of likely attributes associated with fraudulent payments. They were now able to identify devices associated with multiple email IDs and flag payments made from these devices for review. Additionally, they were able to build a rule set using their learnings to proactively block or enforce certain checks on suspicious sets of devices. 

Results and Achievements

Fingerprint helps Headout identify bad actors and devices earlier and has become an integral part of their custom rules-based solution to lower their fraud rates and customer chargebacks significantly. 

• Early detection and analysis result in lower fraud rate
  Using Fingerprint’s visitor identifier combined with a custom rules-based approach, Headout has lowered its overall fraud percentage by over 80%. 
• Reduction in chargebacks
  Due to a significant reduction in fraudulent payments, Headout also saw a dramatic decrease in the amount of chargebacks they received. From its peak, the chargebacks have reduced by roughly 90% and continue to improve.
• Exponential growth
  Reducing fraud and chargebacks by implementing Fingerprint contributed to the explosive growth Headout recently experienced. Since 2021, Headout has increased its revenue by four times and more than doubled its headcount. 

Conclusion

Fingerprint completely transformed how Headout approaches payment fraud and enabled it to achieve its annual goals, including revenue targets and headcount growth. Utilizing Fingerprint’s visitor identifier, Headout can identify fraud attacks earlier than ever before and build a systematic way to analyze and evaluate its website threats. 

“The overall ease of implementation was very important to us and the accuracy. We previously could never identify the devices used by fraudulent actors the way we can today with Fingerprint." - Shivam Darmora, Headout’s Associate Director of Data

To start preventing payment fraud and reducing chargebacks, start a free trial of Fingerprint today.