Identity Theft Prevention and Friendly Fraud Prevention

The main idea behind Proveout.com was to help businesses fight identity theft. It's a serious threat to all companies working online as there are no borders or distances and it is very easy to maintain anonymity for all sort of criminals.

Identity can be stolen in many ways. Phishing and placing trojan horses into someone's computers in order to steal sensitive information (credit card numbers, passwords, certificates and so on) are the most common ways of compromising someone's identity security.

The most common areas where businesses can come across identity theft are online banking, all sorts of user authorization (online e-mail, hosting, bogs, online dating and so on) and credit card purchases.

Proveout.com provides effective and efficient methods of protecting e-businesses from fraudsters.

The idea is very simple - to place a telephone call. If you want to verify your customer - call him.

Here how it generally works for e-shop that accepts credit cards:

• 1. When user proceeds to check out and decides to pay with credit card, our customer does the following:
  • 1.1. Generates a random PIN-code and shows it to the user.

    

  • 1.2. Asks user to make himself available to answer the phone.
  • 1.3. Sends verification request along with user's phone number provided at the time of signup and user's IP address to Proveout.com.

    

• 2. When Proveout.com receives verification request from one of its clients, it does the following:
  • 2.1. Searches through various databases to collect information about user's phone number and IP address.
  • 2.2. Dials this phone number.

    

  • 2.3. Asks user to enter PIN-code shown (see 1.1) via phone keypad.

    

  • 2.4. Records all of the information into database so that our client could access it later on.
  • 2.5. Passes gathered information to the customer that includes country, region and city name from the phone number, phone type (i.e. mobile, landline, VOIP phone such as Skype and so on), country, region and city from the IP address and PIN-code entered by user.

    

• 3. Upon receiving information from Proveout.com, our customer does the following:
  • 3.1. Compares PIN-code passed by Proveout.com with the PIN-code that was shown to the user.

    

    

  • 3.2. Evaluates all of the information passed by Proveout.com (geographic location of phone number and IP address, phone number type and so on).
  • 3.3. Makes thorough decision on the order. User's order and payment can be accepted straight away, suspended or declined.

The whole process generally takes no more than a minute.

In case of user authorization (i.e. for online banking) the whole process will look similar - Proveout.com will call a phone number that was provided during user's sign-up. User will be allowed to access restricted area upon providing correct username and password and completing telephone verification. This kind of verification is much easier for user as there is no need to use various temporary codes and other keys (costly solution for a bank) in order to login.

Password recovery services that include telephone verification tend to be much more effective as it is much easier for a user to answer the phone than memorizing different answers to various difficult questions. Also, using telephone verification makes compromising password recovery impossible as fraudster will not only need to know sensitive information that allows to pass ordinary password recovery service but will also need to have immediate access to the user's phone.

Telephone verification is also an effective solution for friendly fraud problem.

When used in payment process, telephone verification can help fighting friendly fraud by recording some sensitive information about user that can later prove genuine intention to buy goods/services. For example, after completing standard telephone verification procedure, Proveout.com can ask to provide mother's maiden name, credit card limit and so on. Also, some spoken confirmation can be recorded. This kind of information can later be used in case false charges disputes arise.