HUMAN Blog

Connecting the Dots: Why Visibility Is the Key to Winning Against Fraud

If you are like most people these days, your phone is the first and last thing you see each day. It’s there for you all day: your alarm, your shopping list, the calculator to figure out the split on your friends dinner out, the camera to capture that perfect sunset, your fitness tracker... But it’s the ability to connect us to whatever we need no matter where we are that makes it central to our daily lives. 

Whether it’s on our phones, the smart TV in our living room or that fancy laptop, a connection to the internet is the most important tool they provide. The internet has changed how we live our lives. It empowers us to bank from anywhere, stay in touch with high school friends we haven’t seen in person in decades, have groceries delivered to our door and find a ride whenever we need one. 

The internet is no longer a convenience, it’s a necessity that powers our lives. In the words of British author, Torron-Lee Dewar, “The internet is used as not just a tool anymore but as part of our daily makeup. Almost like oxygen.”  For many, it’s almost as important as the oxygen that they breathe. 

We aren’t the only ones that value this connection. With everyone basically doing everything each day on their devices and lots of money spent to reach each person, it’s attractive to fraudsters as well. 

An hour in the life…

Let’s take a walk through an hour in what might be your typical internet journey.  An hour at the end of a long day of work from your home office. 

To catch up with the happenings in the world, you pull up your favorite news site. You flip through a few articles and maybe watch a couple of videos before jumping over to that sports site to find out the latest on the playoffs or your favorite NFL team. 

With your curiosity fulfilled and your brain brought up to speed, it’s time to tackle your bills. Logging in to your bank account to check your balance, you load up a few of your credit card sites as well. Maybe you need to update your mailing address to reflect a recent move or even add an authorized user. 

Multitasking with some Hulu on your SmartTV can help make the bill paying a little less painful. After logging in, maybe you pull up the latest episode of the Handmaid’s Tale or go a little lighter, with some Abbott Elementary.  

Leaving Breadcrumbs Everywhere We Go

As you spend your hour with the internet, you are actually also having interactions with more than the pages on your screens. Even if all you do is read, even if you never log in, you’re engaging with every page you visit. And each of the sites or TV platforms has a set of technology tools and platforms helping to keep it running smoothly.

For example, that news page? Advertising modules and cookies. The bank page? A login portal and a customers-only area (where you view your balance). The bill you paid? A payment processor. The TV show on in the background? Also might have advertising modules.

This is where HUMAN comes in with our platform of solutions designed to keep these sites and streaming services - and you the consumer - free from the tentacles of digital fraud. In many of these, you are likely interacting with our sensor network helping us to safeguard the internet. 

Many of the sites you peruse for news or insider reports on your football team and even some Hulu activity as well are powered by ads. As each of those ad-powered sites is visited, they go through a bunch of live auctions—how much are advertisers willing to pay to put their ad in front of your eyeballs—between when you hit the enter button and when the page loads. HUMAN MediaGuard is positioned squarely within these transactions, safeguarding the bidding process and ensuring that only humans are reached. 

As you log in to your financial accounts, HUMAN Bot Defender may be in the background ensuring that you are who you say you are. Automated attacks by cybercriminals threaten to enable them to gain access to accounts to steal money or information. Bot Defender helps to uncover and block these automated attacks.

Making key changes (address, payment information, bank account information) tends to be one of the first things cybercriminals do when they take control of an account. As a result, many sites turn to HUMAN to protect their user accounts after login as well. If one of your financial sites has HUMAN Account Defender on its side, it will take a deep look at your activities ensuring you are a legitimate user of the account. 

The World’s Largest Digital Fraud Sensor Network 

HUMAN validates more than 20 trillion interactions each week and observes more than half of the devices on the internet each month. This gives us a clear visibility advantage.  

HUMAN’s visibility advantage enables us to deliver stronger fraud models, identify anomalies faster and react quicker to threats. All of this makes it more difficult for cybercriminals to adapt to our protections. 

We see more, we know more and we can do more. The results? Our clients now play to win in the battle against fraud.