Braintree Examines Consumers’ Cross-Merchant Purchases to Fight Fraud

Braintree is viewing consumer purchasing behavior at multiple merchants to improve fraud mitigation.

Braintree, which uses a set of rules with hundreds of variables to spot attacks, will leverage the scale provided by its large network of online and mobile merchants to provide free fraud protection to smaller merchants and startups, which often can lack the resources to manage quickly evolving security threats.

“We recently encountered a distributed attack from fraudsters who used a database of stolen credit cards on our site,” said Vlad Gurgov, chief technology officer at Virool, a video ad network, in a Sept. 5 press release. “Braintree’s payment platform will help us manage fraud without dedicating resources or integrating with a third party.”

Other companies using aggregation to combat payments fraud include BillGuard, which collects complaints about devious charges from merchants. Lemon Wallet integrated BillGuard into its mobile wallet to protect cards customers link to Lemon’s mobile app.

“Our experience in processing more than $10 billion of online and mobile commerce annually has given us the data and expertise needed to deliver comprehensive tools that further protect our merchants and stop fraudsters,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready. “Fraud is not a problem limited to large merchants. Our goal is to provide startups everything they need to grow and scale, including fraud protection."