LegitScript

Fraud Solution Profile

Merchant Monitoring

LegitScript’s Merchant Monitoring solution pairs the speed of automation with the accuracy of human analysts who review flagged websites before sending them to you, meaning you’ll get effectively zero false positives. Furthermore, our experts look beyond a merchant’s website, conducting open-source research across the internet to uncover risky business affiliations and suspicious practices, such as transaction laundering and deceptive marketing. We provide detailed, actionable intelligence with our notifications, and our policy experts are here for you when you have questions. Extensive global data, expert human analysis, and unparalleled transaction laundering detection are all included in our service.

While automated solutions have the ability to review merchant websites quickly, that doesn’t always mean clients get their results in a timely manner. A standard industry reporting cadence is monthly, meaning that the merchant monitoring service provider (MMSP) compiles all flagged merchant websites over the course of one month and then shares the file, usually a long spreadsheet of URLs. This is problematic because it means that violative merchants in your portfolio may continue operating for up to a month before you action them — risking detection by card brands.

LegitScript’s solution offers real-time reporting. Results of our monitoring are made available to you in a drip feed cadence, giving you access to our findings as soon as we complete the analysis. This allows you to action problematic merchants almost immediately rather than having to wait weeks.

Transaction Laundering Detection

Transaction laundering is one of the most pernicious and nefarious problems facing payment service providers. Even as risk and compliance teams implement best practices to identify and stop transaction laundering, bad actors find new ways to open seemingly innocuous merchant accounts that they use for illicit purposes.

Most MMSPs offer some kind of transaction laundering service, either as part of their merchant monitoring or as an add-on service. However, the approaches to detecting transaction laundering vary widely. Some solutions offer
transaction laundering checks based on historical data points of known offenders; others claim to detect it on merchant websites through an AI-powered review, which is notoriously shallow and inaccurate.

LegitScript’s approach is more proactive. Our Merchant Monitoring team selects a violative website appearing to take payments online and leverages open source investigation to understand more information about its payment processing. Often, a test transaction reveals additional unique data points that we can use to identify the affiliated shell companies and merchant accounts.

The intelligence we collect through test buys enters LegitScript’s vast knowledge ecosystem and allows us to alert our partners with relevant, actionable data. Reporting the violative website may seem like a resolution to the incident, but transaction launderers typically operate multiple merchant accounts for load balancing. Our Merchant Monitoring team tracks these data points to perform an ongoing investigation of your portfolio to identify these
merchant clusters.

LegitScript’s all-in-one solution helps you stay abreast of trends, proactively track problematic activity, and expand your business into new industries and jurisdictions.