How Does Device Fingerprinting Fight Fraud?

 Just as the rise of e-commerce has reshaped the retail experience, device fingerprinting has transformed the landscape of cybersecurity. For decision-makers in today’s digital realm, understanding how device fingerprinting works is essential to protecting assets and maintaining user trust. You might be wondering, "What exactly is device fingerprinting, and how can it enhance a digital platform’s security against fraud?”

In this article, we will cover the role of device fingerprinting in fighting fraud along with some use cases.

How Device Fingerprinting Prevents Fraud in Online Organizations?

Device fingerprinting technology allows digital platform owners to stay one step ahead of fraudsters, ensuring a safer experience for everyone. Device fingerprinting can be a valuable tool in the fight against fraud. Here’s how it works:

Unique Device Identification

Device fingerprinting technology assigns a unique identifier for every user to access the platform, making it possible to distinguish between legitimate users and potential fraudsters. This unique ID is created by compiling various device attributes of users, allowing each user to be recognized every time they revisit the website. 

This feature makes device fingerprinting a powerful tool for fraud prevention, as the fingerprint is specific to each user and difficult to alter, ultimately enhancing security and trust across digital platforms.

User Behavioral Analysis

Fraud prevention systems based on device fingerprinting effectively analyze dynamic factors like user behavior, login patterns, typing patterns, and transaction history. This adds another layer of uniqueness to the fingerprint, further strengthening the security measures in place. Platform managers receive notifications in case of anomalies or the slightest indication of fraudulent activity, flagging the device to prevent any potential fraud.

Real-Time Fraud Detection 

Device fingerprinting is the key to real-time fraud detection. By capturing both static as well as dynamic device details, it can constantly monitor and validate user authenticity during live sessions, making it an efficient tool for real-time user authentication.

Intelligent Fraud Prevention (use of AI and ML)

Device fingerprinting leads to intelligent fraud prevention while integrating with the latest technologies. Machine learning algorithms can be trained to recognize patterns associated with known fraudulent activities based on device fingerprints to improve the effectiveness of fraud detection.

Adaptation To New Frauds & Trends

Fraudsters are clever, but the nature of their tactics often follows recognizable patterns. As mentioned earlier, fingerprints can be used to train algorithms to recognize fraudulent patterns; similarly, they can adapt to new frauds and build a resilient defense mechanism against new forms of fraud.

Reduced False Positives

False positives have been a major challenge for organizations while dealing with fraud, but that’s not the case with device fingerprinting. The technique analyzes static device information and dynamic device factors; thus, integrating device fingerprinting with other authentication methods reduces the chances of false positives. With this small change, organizations can more effectively identify genuine fraudsters while enhancing the user experience for legitimate customers by minimizing unnecessary interruptions.

Use cases of Device Fingerprinting in Fraud Prevention

• Detecting Fake Accounts: Detect every fake account to focus on your real users.

• Identifying Referral and Promo Abuse: Stop bad users from abusing referral and promo campaigns.

• Preventing Subscription Abuse: Stop fraudulent subscriptions and unauthorized account sharing.

• Stopping Multi-Accounting & Account Takeover Attempts: Protect your users' personal data and prevent financial losses.

• Mitigating Incentive Abuse & Collusion: Stop users working together to abuse cashback programs and incentives.

• Enhancing Bot Attack Detection: Build resilience against DDoS, API, scraping, carding, credential stuffing, server overloading, and more.

• Detecting Payment Fraud: Stop fraudsters in real time and approve more genuine transactions.

How SHIELD Helps Digital Businesses Fight Fraud with Device Fingerprinting?

SHIELD is a device-first fraud intelligence platform that helps digital businesses worldwide stop all fraudulent activity. SHIELD device fingerprinting solution identifies the root of fraud with the global standard for device identification (SHIELD Device ID) and actionable fraud intelligence, empowering businesses to stay ahead of new and unknown fraud threats.

SHIELD is working on the mission of eliminating unfairness and enabling trust in the digital world. It is trusted by global unicorns like inDrive, Alibaba, Swiggy, Meesho, TrueMoney, and more.

Interested in learning how device fingerprinting can help your business combat fraud? Schedule a demo with us today.