How DreamHost prevents new account fraud and multi-accounting
Use Case
New Account Fraud
Industry
Cloud Services
Company Size
250
Region
USA
Ready to prevent multi-accounting and new account fraud?
About DreamHost
DreamHost is a web hosting provider that has been around for over 25 years providing services such as Wordpress and website hosting, domain registration, email services, and cloud hosting.
The challenge: Stopping multi-accounting
DreamHost's primary fraud challenge was mitigating bad actors signing up for multiple accounts to make illegitimate purchases or utilize their service space for nefarious or illegal purposes. For example, if successful with their account creation, these bad actors could use DreamHost to execute spam campaigns or mine Bitcoin.
These use cases presented a challenge because some bad actors attempted would make multiple attempts to create multiple accounts. DreamHost tried to prevent this through a process that included manual reviews, which took up valuable time while still failing to catch fake signups. Additionally, the team's time was also wasted on reviewing legitimate account signups.
Because of this and the gap in data to accurately identify returning fraudsters, especially when they obfuscated their IP addresses and used different credit cards, DreamHost needed a way to quickly identify and stop bad actors from signing up for multiple accounts.
Why Fingerprint
DreamHost came to Fingerprint to solve that gap. By offering a solution that provided different real-time signals, from identifying a user's IP geolcation with high accuracy to detecting bots, Fingerprint is now a crucial part of the company's visitor identification process.
With Fingerprint, DreamHost can now identify visitors attempting to sign up for multiple accounts using the same device, even if they intentionally obfuscate their identity through false or stolen contact information, spoofed or distorted IP addresses, and stolen credit card information. By combining Fingerprint with their existing system, DreamHost strengthened their account signup security processes while limiting friction for legitimate visitors looking to create an account.
"With Fingerprint, we're now able to really see an impact in the number of duplicate accounts we're able to detect. This reduces the need for heavy protections on legitimate signups and the need for manual reviews on signups."
- Calvin Schneider, VP of Data Science at DreamHost
Results: Reduced multi-accounting and referral bonus abuse detection
Once DreamHost implemented Fingerprint, the company's was able to more accurately detect and identify duplicate account signups and multi-accounting. DreamHost can now associate direct and indirect financial impact from being able to see those signups.
There was also an unexpected benefit — implementing Fingerprint uncovered a problem DreamHost was previously unaware of: referral bonus abuse. The company realized that people were trying to sign up multiple times — sometimes even dozens of times — to claim referral bonuses offered by DreamHost.
"I recommended the use of Fingerprint to the planning team based on my past usage with Fingerprint and their bot detection solution. In my past experience with Fingerprint, the implementation has been very easy, and the results were immediate — no malicious traffic ever since.
The documentation is easy to understand, whether you use the provided client libraries or you need to consume the endpoints directly."
- Damian Nowak, VP of Software Development at DreamHost
Key takeaways
Fingerprint proved to be an effective and powerful solution to thwart bad actors in several ways, including stopping multi-accounting and bonus abuse. DreamHost has also streamlined the manual review process to focus only on the sign-ups flagged by their system as fraudulent, saving the team time.
