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Poshmark Uses TruValidate Device Risk To Better Protect Customer Accounts

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Industry

Retail

Category

Ecommerce marketplace

Products

Scenario

Poshmark Inc.'s online marketplaces are impacted by malicious account creation, phony listings, financial scams, spam content and loyalty abuse. All of these can erode user trust, expose users to bad actors and discourage continued business on the platform. Poshmark sought to proactively protect their seller and buyer community. In addition, Poshmark took on chargeback liability for its community. They quickly implemented an enhanced fraud detection solution to help identify risky users and devices and ensure security while simultaneously providing a friction-appropriate experience for their community.

Strategy

Poshmark selected TransUnion TruValidate™ Device Risk to better protect accounts based on its robust device data and flexible, customizable business rules. Device Risk tracks relationships between devices and accounts, leveraging device history and confirmed fraud reports from our global consortium of fraud analysts. Configurable to the unique needs of every organization, Device Risk helps organizations provide friction-right consumer experiences, mitigating fraud while letting legitimate consumers and applications through faster.

Implementing Device Risk enabled Poshmark to quickly assess risk and take action early in the customer journey. Poshmark applies Device Risk’s rich set of custom configurable rules to ascertain whether the user is risky or not. Device Risk uses configurable device intelligence and consortium data to determine the level of risk associated with an account:

  • Over 10 billion known devices
  • Over 100 million detailed known fraud reports
  • A global consortium of fraud and security analysts
  • Fraud evidence data that is retained for a minimum of 5 years from the time reported

Based on the Device Risk assessment, Poshmark can identify users who may proceed without additional friction, uncover users who need additional verification and protect their community by denying bad actors.  Device Risk also helps Poshmark detect potential bot activity by assessing velocity and high-volume spikes in traffic.

Device Risk enables Poshmark to identify new and unknown devices that might have risk, which helps eliminate fictitious disputes, increases security for Poshmark and their community and improves customer experience for legitimate buyers and sellers.

Results

By using Device Risk, Poshmark has tuned their fraud detection according to their unique fraud needs and strategy — leveraging the controls and signals available to alleviate risk. They take advantage of the flexibility of Device Risk to solve more than one problem, such as helping facilitate bot challenges, mitigating account takeover and loyalty abuse, and reducing chargebacks.

The transparency with the data and feedback have been very valuable to us. TruValidate Device Risk does not just provide an outcome, but the explainabilty of the data puts the power in our hands. It helps augment our internal data and strengthen our fraud strategy.

Robbie Fritts, Vice President of Fraud and Payments, Poshmark

Device Risk provides insight into potential fraud based on the risk profiles of devices and its transactions:

  • Real-time risks and hidden fraud patterns, such as exceeding velocity thresholds, a risky profile match, evidence of evasion techniques, and consortium customer reports of specific types of fraud and abuse
  • Classification of up to 45 specific types of fraud, such as credit card fraud, identity theft, and account takeover
  • Geolocation/IP checks indicating where the site visitor is coming from, including country, the stated and real IP address, and latitude and longitude
  • Revealing device and account linkages to uncover fraud rings – even across other organizations or industries, such as financial services or insurance
  • Analyzing thousands of permutations of device attributes to accurately identify a device while minimizing false positives
  • Leveraging shared evidence from our global consortium network to identify devices with previous connections to fraud without causing unnecessary friction for trustworthy customers

Valuable partner protecting our community

In addition, the partnership and high level of engagement with TransUnion’s Customer Success team adds tremendous value for Poshmark. The TransUnion Customer Success team has subject matter expertise and provides key guidance. They are proactive and help at every step of the way.

“When faced with problems, we never feel like we are on our own. TransUnion helps partner with us to alert us to changes in volumes and provides data support to help us diagnose and solve challenges.”

Robbie Fritts, Vice President of Fraud and Payments, Poshmark

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