Portland, OR – September 22, 2008 – iovation, the Device Reputation Authority™ for the Internet and leading force in the battle between online businesses and the spammers and scammers who work vigorously to try and take advantage of them, today announced it has helped online communities worldwide stop more than half a million fraudulent and abusive activities in 2008. iovation, which uses the reputations of devices to determine in milliseconds whether or not an online transaction is coming from a fraudulent computer, will be exhibiting to top level Internet dating executives at this week’s Internet Dating and Social Networking Conference, Stand #5, at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Kensington and Conference Center in London.
iovation helps Internet-based companies improve the trust levels between them and their members by stemming the tide of cybercriminals who try to use their Web sites to scam, spread spam, malware, and steal users’ identities. The process involves using device identification to create reputations for unique computers that have been used to commit a variety of fraudulent and abusive activities. iovation then shares its database of more than 65 million device reputations with subscribing sites, which allows them to work together to proactively recognize, re-recognize, and block fraudulent devices trying to regain access to their online communities.
“While the online dating industry continues to enjoy tremendous success across the globe, fraud managers face a number of challenges that threaten to hinder the growth of their business, and the industry itself," said Greg Pierson, founder and CEO of iovation. "With the relative ease at which fraudsters obtain false identity information to create new profiles and accounts, combining identity-based techniques with a device-centric approach augments existing fraud management systems that currently rely too heavily on identity information. Including device reputations as another technique to detect fraud and abuse provides a multi-layered defense that allows fraud teams to move quickly and put a stop to the viscous cycle of repeat offenders.”
iovation performs over a billion fraud checks per year for its customers, 30 percent of which come from online communities that include Internet dating and social networking sites. During the first half of 2008, the highest concentration of computers trying to abuse online communities that use iovation came from Belgium (9%), Ghana (8%) and the Philippines (6%).
Along with making online sites safer for their trusted members, companies working with iovation find that they are wasting less of their resources tracking down bad information and having to police their sites. “iovation is helping the Internet dating industry work together to beat scammers, spammers, and those that would be detrimental to Internet dating communities,” said Mark Brooks, a prominent consultant to the Internet dating industry and editor of Online Personals Watch.
According to the Gartner study on cybercrime, there is a new identity theft victim every two seconds. As scammers and thieves hone their trade, dating sites, as well as any other that is member-based, will need to beef up their arsenal in the fight to protect their customers. iovation is leading the fight.
iovation, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, pioneered the use of device reputation for managing all forms of online fraud and abuse in the online communities industry. iovation unlocks the power of device identification by sharing the reputations of tens of millions of unique computers and mobile devices worldwide, allowing businesses to control fraud and abuse while benefiting from sharing device reputation intelligence. Today, iovation performs more than three million daily fraud checks for its customers and will process over a billion reputation queries in 2008. For more information on iovation and its products, visit www.iovation.com.