99designs Uses Smyte to Identify and Reduce Account Fraud

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smyte announces that 99designs is using its anti-abuse software platform to combat account fraud. An online graphic design marketplace, 99designs has been using Smyte since 2016. Since then the company has doubled the amount of users it has blocked for abusing its multiple accounts policy. 99designs has also reduced time-to-resolution for shutting down spammer-created accounts to zero, saving hours of manual review.

99designs was founded in 2008 and is based in Melbourne, Australia with offices in Oakland, CA and Berlin. The company connects designers with businesses and entrepreneurs who need help creating graphics for logos, ads and apps, among other things. Nearly 500,000 companies have used 99designs over the past decade, generating more than $200 million for its global community of designers.

The 99designs marketplace protection team, led by Molly Main, is responsible for monitoring designer and cstomer accounts and transactions for instances of fraud and abuse. Main and her team see a wide variety of account fraud, ranging from credit card schemes to money laundering as well as phishing and spamming scams.

“Sometimes a bad guy will test stolen cards on our site to see if they work, or they’ll masquerade as a legitimate customer and create another account to pay themselves using a stolen card,” says Main, whose title is Payment & Risk Analyst. “The schemes are clever and constantly changing, and when effective they can be extremely costly.”

For example, a bad guy might set up a few hundred accounts at once, and use the accounts to solicit legitimate 99designs users. Smyte’s custom labeling works with its machine learning system that detects spam signals and clusters related accounts. Using the labels, 99designs can send the cluster of accounts to an automated takedown queue. The detection, clustering, labeling, and bulk takedown response is all done inside the Smyte platform. “This has saved us a ton of time,” says Main, “and helps to ensure a great customer experience.”

Smyte analyzes account usage patterns based on pre-set rules, which can be revised as patterns change and new schemes are identified. “Smyte helps by automatically spotting abnormalities that would have required manual review,” says Main. “We’re still doing some review manually, but our goal is for Smyte to handle the most malicious schemes. Already Smyte has saved us hours in staff time.”

About Smyte
Smyte is a blend of application security, anti-fraud, and content moderation that more effectively combats fraud and abuse at lower cost. Offering a holistic point of view, Smyte uses signals from across data sources to pinpoint account takeover, payment fraud, content policy violation, spam, phishing, and peer to peer collusion. Instead of an opaque fraud score the platform feeds analysts a constant flow of actionable information about the incident or threat under investigation. Keeping the human in the loop, Smyte experts customize machine learning models according to the customer’s policies and business logic. All the data flows into Smyte’s proprietary rules engine so automation specialists and anti-abuse engineers can instantly deploy stateful custom rules without touching the product. For more information, visit www.smyte.com.

Media contact:
Kevin Wolf
TGPR
(650) 327 1641
[email protected]

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