Global Personals partner with Scamalytics to present unified front against online fraud

Posted by sophie on January 9, 2014

Global Personals Ltd, one of the world’s largest privately owned online dating and digital media companies, announce the initial results of their partnership with scammer detection software provider, Scamalytics.

Scamalytics focus specifically on detecting scammers in the online dating industry, by sharing intelligence and human feedback between dating companies. Their solution offers a comprehensive suite of tests, underpinned by shared data of scammer-identifying blacklists and models.

After first forming a partnership in January 2013, Scamalytics software now assesses up to 100 pieces of information from the Global Personals platform per second. Global Personals identify this as crucial in allowing faster identification of scammers and the minimisation of online fraud.

Global Personals employ a team of over thirty highly trained moderators to process every piece of profile data uploaded to the company’s online dating network, that hosts 30 million members. Since October 2013, Scamalytics intelligent software has been learning from the behaviour of Global Personals in-house moderation team, and its network, feeding back information into its own database. The tool can now identify behavioural traits such as language patterns before human eyes even set sight on the information, allowing trained moderators to focus their efforts on uncovering new scammer trends and removing suspicious parties from the network even more quickly.

The tool identifies mismatches from IP addresses and locations, as well as remembering spurious email addresses and IP addresses that have been used by those previously identified by scammers on both the Global Personals network, and data acquired from every other dating site using Scamalytics. Thresholds can be set based on gender, territory and network; this means that Global Personals are able to provide a fully tailored set of information to the tool based on a variety of typical scammer behaviours for certain demographics, as particular trends on specific kinds of dating sites (mature, for example) are identifiable. This marks a positive step in the ongoing war on scammers as the dating industry works together to stamp out online fraud.

In addition, Global Personals’ integration with Scamalytics is expected to significantly reduce chargebacks. Not only does this benefit WhiteLabelDating.com partners in preventing them from accruing revenues that will then need to be refunded, but most importantly, prevents scammers from having any access, however short-lived, to the Global Personals network to pay for dating site subscriptions with stolen cards; this is a positive step in the reduction of online credit card fraud on the whole.

Bill Richards, General Manager at Global Personals, heads up the customer and fraud division at the company and has worked closely on the Scamalytics project. Of the partnership, he said:

“Our partnership with Scamalytics, and their work with selected bodies in the dating industry, signifies the beginning of a co-operative defence against scammers. In presenting a unified front, we are opposing these cyber criminals with a serious preventative weapon against online fraud.”

Scammers do not work alone; these individuals are part of wider serious organised crime, and often operate in criminal gangs. Whilst our trained moderators are adept at spotting and removing these people from our dating network, their techniques continue to grow more sophisticated. Scamalytics has been exceptionally valuable to our fight against scammers and this is only the beginning of what’s predicted to be a long partnership. It’s important to remember, however, that the software still needs to learn these behaviours from a human team. When software and human mind are combined, we have an iron-cast solution to minimising online fraud.
Ross Williams, co-founder and CEO of Global Personals, commented:

“Working with Scamalytics has continued our vital and on-going work on one of the biggest issues facing the dating industry. Global Personals commit a huge amount of resource to keeping our database free from scammers (including 24 hour moderation, free customer support and specialised fraud teams) and look forward to learning and developing our fraud prevention techniques further in a long relationship with Scamalytics.”

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