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Investing in the Fight Against Digital Fraud & Online Brand Abuse

I’m grateful today. Actually, I’m grateful most days because I get to work with an amazing team to combat a pressing problem that costs the world tens-of-billions of dollars each year. But today, I’m especially grateful. That’s because a new round of fresh investment has arrived at Allure Security, and now we’re taking things to the next level. I’m thankful to our investors – Gutbrain Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, Impellent Ventures, PBJ Capital, Portage Partners, and Zetta Venture Partners – for believing in and ultimately sponsoring our mission to put an end to online scams.

At Allure Security, we’re all committed to building the fastest, most accurate, most effective weapon against online fraud and one of its top sources – the scourge of brand impersonation, fake websites, rogue mobile apps, and deceptive social media profiles. What’s past is prologue. Allure Security’s history is a launching pad for the present. I consider today the true launch of our company.

The Problem: Brand Abuse & Fake Websites

The brand impersonation problem captivates me because it’s the source of most fraud online these days. Regardless of how a scam is distributed (e.g., SMS, e-mail, QR code, online ad, you name it), most of the time it directs victims to a web page that abuses a trusted brand in order to steal something from visitors. When we can detect and dismantle the malicious online content that exploits consumers’ trust of their favorite brands, we can make a huge dent in the fraud problem.

Finding a scam on the internet is easy; just check your inbox. But finding scams in the beginning phases, before they’re disseminated or hook their first victim? That’s harder. It’s difficult to fathom the size of the web in the first place – billions of users, billions of sites, petabytes of data. The internet’s vastness provides plenty of hiding places for scammers. Undetected, scammers have free reign to do whatever they want, wherever they want, targeting anyone they want. Lacking sufficient visibility into imposter websites, malicious mobile apps, and deceptive social media profiles that abuse their brand online, a company and its customers are vulnerable.

Legacy approaches to the problem of deceptive online content, such as domain monitoring, fail to identify 71% of malicious websites according to Google, PayPal and Arizona State University researchers.¹ This means that for every scam identified, approximately three more remain active and out-of-sight of a business.

Every minute a scam website remains accessible it snares more victims, increases fraud costs, and sets the stage for customer churn.

• 60 percent of victims visit a scam site within the first 10 hours (according to the same Google, Paypal, and ASU study)
• Identity fraud has an average cost of $1,100 per victim (according to Javelin Research & Strategy)²
• 38 percent of identity fraud victims end up closing accounts (according to the same Javelin Research study)

The Solution: Finding Scam Sites Before They Do Damage

Our mission at Allure Security is to shorten the lifespan of online scams to reduce fraud costs, protect revenue, curtail brand damage, and prevent staff burnout while increasing customer trust and satisfaction.

Finding an instance of brand impersonation as close to the beginning of its lifecycle as possible significantly decreases the damage it can do. In many cases, Allure Security identifies and responds to a fake website before its creator activates their campaign – effectively stomping out the scam before it starts or traps its first victim.

Faster, More Accurate Detection

What makes this possible, and makes Allure Security uniquely effective, is our patented artificial intelligence-based system that can see and understand digital content (via a combination of computer vision and natural language processing). Our system ingests multiple sources of information simultaneously to examine millions of websites per hour. Because we can achieve this scale of detection, we can identify the earliest signals of a brand impersonation in progress but prior to launch – pre-empting the scam before it even begins.

Multi-Pronged Response

Once a scam website is identified and before stolen data can be used or monetized, our system immediately gets to work rendering the scam ineffective via blocklists, takedowns, and our one-of-a-kind deception technology. We take response a step further by automatically inputting seemingly legitimate decoy information into the scam site’s log-in fields. This effectively poisons the collected data, which makes it useless for fraud and quickly exposes anyone that attempts to make use of decoy data. In the end, Allure Security erodes the economic viability of these types of scams – ruining the scammer’s business model.

In the past, many scams were only identified when a customer called to complain. We focus on finding and shutting-down scams quickly to reduce the chances that your customers will visit a fake website let alone potentially fall victim and have to deal with the fallout.

The Future

Today, Allure Security solutions spot thousands of new scams every single day, before anybody else. We can measure our performance against other solutions because we all do our work on the open internet. Our approach outperforms traditional mechanisms and other offerings in volume, speed, and accuracy.

Summing up –  the time is now. We’re here to stop online brand abuse and related scams. I’m so excited to show the world, and you, how – schedule a demo today to see for yourself.

¹ https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20fall_oest_prepub.pdf
² https://www.javelinstrategy.com/press-release/total-identity-fraud-losses-soar-56-billion-2020