Ukash is hoping a fraud-prevention service offered by Iovation will help to reduce the potential for improper use of its prepaid voucher service, the Portland, Ore.-based vendor announced Dec. 28.
United Kingdom-based Ukash’s vouchers have unique 19-digit codes consumers enter when initiating purchases on participating merchant Web sites. Ukash sells the vouchers to consumers who prefer not to use payment cards for online purchases or who cannot use cards.
Since it was formed in 2001, the company has grown to 420,000 physical points of service and is available in more than 50 countries. PaymentsSource was unable to reach a representative fromthe company for comment.
Greg Pierson, Iovation founder and CEO, tells PaymentsSource Ukash had concerns about crooks potentially using its service to launder money, and it also wanted to prevent voucher theft. “Ukash has some features that are great if you’re a good guy, but they’re also great for folks to abuse,” he says.
Pierson believes Iovation’s services will help Ukash to identify and avoid fraudulent activity and abuse.
The company’s ReputationManager 360 service helps to identify potential crooks based on their historic activity with the device or devices they use to access its customers’ services online. “As folks show up to do online business, we say whether they are good or bad, independent of or without their personal data or financial information,” Pierson says. “We focus on the physical devices folks use to connect to the Internet.”
Iovation’s customers include more than 300 Web properties covering retail, financial services, social networks, gaming and other services. Each reports all of their transaction activity to the company.
Using the parameters clients set themselves, Iovation determines the level of risk based on previous activity conducted with the devices used to initiate purchases or other events, such as registering for a new account, Pierson says.
“We stop 100,000 fraudulent activities every single day,” he says, noting Iovation’s database tracks nearly 500 million devices. “We understand how [those devices] are used across the customers we protect.”
Customers pay Iovation based on the rules they set for the monitoring they want done and on the volume of activity monitored, Pierson says.
Iovation categorizes all problems its customers experience, such as spam, inappropriate content and money laundering, and customers can determine from those categories which to include in their transaction monitoring.
“We wrap the rules around those,” Pierson says. “That’s what ‘360’ is.”
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