Preventing Fraud with Real-Time Data Sources

Reviewing a digital order with limited data, is like reviewing a partial signature for potential forgeries. For example: choose the true partial signature of John Hancock with the limited information provided below.  

When determining a true signature, one must know the true signature or form of writing to be able to distinguish the authentic signature from the forgeries. 

The concept of analyzing digital orders for fraud prevention is Similar. In both cases, one must know what the truth looks like in order to filter out the potential fakes. 

Rob Daline, the founder of ArkOwl, began his career as a fraud analyst. He trained other fraud analysts to recognize legitimate customer behavior from bad. And he founded ArkOwl thinking of the common problem that every fraud analyst faces in determining legitimate customers from imposters –the lack of information available to verify.

When it comes to an online transaction or account creation, being able to check an email address and phone number side-by-side for additional data through ArkOwl can uncover important information to determine order legitimacy. This is much like revealing more of the picture in the provided signatures in the examples shown below.

ArkOwl adds many data points to reveal a larger picture of the email address or phone number in question. ArkOwl does this by querying registered social network checks, data breach associations, domain registration information, and email provider checks. 

One of the ways that ArkOwl reveals more of the picture is through the Email/Phone connection feature.This feature appears when an email and phone number are queried at the same time and are found to be in connection with each other. In every case study that ArkOwl has done, this continues to be the most successful data point that is consistent with legitimate online ordering and account creation being over 23x more likely to be safe than the average.

ArkOwl primarily focuses on providing data streams from live real-time data sources, much like a search engine that searches the web in the moment of a query. Acquiring live data access differs in traditional data sourcing methods that rely on purchasing and storing data sets. There are two main benefits to accessing live data.

1. The data is always accessible and updated by the data owner. This means that there is a direct link between the data being shown and the behavior of the legit customer or fraudster in question. 
2. Data does not stay current forever and decays over time. When caching, acquiring, and sharing data from other sources, one can experience a mixture of results from the data. Live data, like the kind that ArkOwl sources, states the facts of what is currently known as opposed to what could be or what could have been.  

ArkOwl seeks to uncover the truth while still being conscious of self-imposed and rigid data privacy standards. Besides keeping a log of the queries that are performed, no other data is stored. Queries that are made on ArkOwl are anonymized so that no data is passed through to any third parties that are included in the results. If a data breach were to happen, hackers would be severely disappointed not to find anything. In short, ArkOwl strives to maintain responsible information security by keeping away from hoarding data sets that require responsible handling of the data. 

Being an inexpensive check, ArkOwl has proven to provide value at high volumes as a first go-to service for many companies. Having ArkOwl as a first check minimizes the amount of transactions that need to be reviewed at higher costs.