September 2022 Summaries

Referral marketing is a highly effective strategy, with 92% of consumers trusting recommendations from people they know, and structured programs often leading to significant revenue growth. However, businesses must be wary of referral fraud, which occurs when individuals exploit these programs for unearned rewards through tactics like self-referrals, return abuse, repeat referrals, and broadcasting codes online. Such fraud can distort marketing data, lead to revenue losses, and consume time and resources in detection and prevention efforts. To combat this, companies can implement measures such as offering non-cash rewards, setting strict program rules, and utilizing advanced tools like browser fingerprinting services to identify and deter fraudulent activities, thus safeguarding their referral programs and maintaining genuine customer growth.

Payment fraud poses a significant global threat to businesses engaged in online transactions, manifesting in various forms such as card cracking, credit card fraud, friendly fraud, and mobile payment fraud. A webinar titled "The State of Payment Fraud & How To Prevent It," hosted by customer success expert Gabe, delves into the global impact and financial costs of payment fraud on businesses, while also explaining the mechanisms through which it occurs. The session highlights key warning signs of potential fraud and introduces Fingerprint Pro as a solution for detecting and preventing fraudulent activities through precise device identification, thus minimizing chargebacks, safeguarding profits, and maintaining online reputations. Attendees are encouraged to watch the recording to learn more about these strategies and their implementation.

Fingerprint has launched a new integration with Cloudflare, introducing an Integration Wizard that simplifies the setup process for its users. This partnership with Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, enhances Fingerprint's ability to generate browser fingerprints without being blocked by ad blockers, which previously hindered requests by identifying the Fingerprint URL. By routing API requests through the user's domain, the integration ensures that ad blockers do not detect external URLs, thereby increasing accuracy in browsers with stringent privacy settings like Safari and Firefox. This change also allows cookies to be recognized as "first-party," extending the lifetime of visitor IDs and preventing ad blockers from blocking identification requests. The new Cloudflare Integration Wizard streamlines the integration process, making it accessible during the onboarding of new customers, while existing customers can contact support for setup.

The article explores the challenges and methods of browser fingerprinting, focusing on anti-fingerprinting techniques and their impact on user experience and fraud prevention. It describes two main approaches: uniformity, which makes browsers appear similar to reduce fingerprinting, and randomization, which varies browser fingerprints to prevent identification, with examples from browsers like Brave and Firefox. Despite these techniques, fingerprinting remains a valuable tool for preventing online fraud, as it can operate unobtrusively in the background to identify fraudulent behavior without affecting legitimate users. The discussion highlights the complexity of effectively implementing these methods due to various entropy sources and the potential reversibility of randomized data, emphasizing the need for reliable identification strategies in combating online fraud.

Fingerprint for iOS version 2.0 introduces significant enhancements aimed at improving device identification capabilities for mobile developers, addressing the need for precise visitor recognition on both web and mobile platforms. The latest version offers new features such as a request identifier for querying server API details, linked ID support for associating iOS identification events with internal identifiers, and a more comprehensive backend response that includes IP address, location, and detection confidence. Additionally, the SDK has been optimized for faster response times by eliminating dependencies on WKWebView and UI stack, and it now supports the async/await interface in Swift, enhancing the ease of implementation and interaction with fraud detection systems. These updates mark a substantial progression from version 1.0, making it easier for developers to integrate advanced device identification and security measures into their iOS applications.