Aim Group Special Report — Fraud and Abuse in Classifieds

Read what Aim Group had to say about Adpay in their 2013 Aim Group Special Report — Fraud and Abuse in Classifieds:

Sites battle for safety, security using both man and machine

With hundreds of classified website clients, Adpay Media Solutions deals a lot with fraud. And for each site, the tools and standards are different.

The 11-year-old company, based in Denver, sets unique rules and maintains unique blacklists for each site it offers.

“We have a ton of experience in fraud and have built a lot of fraud detection into our system, some of it unique to the classified space,” CEO Mike Heene told the AIM Group.

Adpay offers PCI compliance for secure credit card usage, captchas for verification of human response, visitor flagging and asymmetric password encryption. For its publisher clients Adpay retains and continually updates a list of bad email addresses, IP addresses and words.

“Some flags are client-specific,” Heene said. “Each client can set up its own bad-word list. Each can determine what, when and how often they wish to require approval for photo and text submissions, and can activate an escalation queue as well.”

Cyber-attack prevention is client-controlled as well.

“Each site can set parameters,” said Heene.”They could say, ‘I only want some-body to create two ads in one hour and if an account creates more than that I won’t allow them to do it.’ They also tell us what they want us to do with that user – notify the site, notify us, shut them down or give them a warning.”

Adpay keeps an eye on advertisers using multiple client sites. If an advertiser were to post to multiple sites in a short period of time the vendor would lock down that user. The account would be disabled and flagged to all client sites as a spammer.

“What we’ve seen and had to deal with is mainly foreign attacks –– robot denial of service attacks, for instance, and some attempted credit card fraud, though not a rash of the latter,” said Heene.