At the 2005 Internet Dating Conference I remember a dating executive standing up in the audience and proposing that the dating industry share the IP addresses of scammers. This sounded like a good idea at the time. However, simply sharing IP addresses isn’t enough, obviously. More factors really need taking into account to effectively ‘fingerprint’ a device. Enter iovation.
iovation (an Intel Capital and SAP Ventures backed company) helps the dating industry work together to beat scammers and those that would abuse our communities.
Here’s how, as I understand it. (There’s a lot more to it). A scammer, lets call him Fred, enters dating site A and is identified as being a scammer. Scammer Fred then creates another profile and tries re-entering dating site A. Dating site A is able to see that that device has already been associated with scamming activity, and is able to deal with the scammer appropriately.
Now here’s the real beauty of the iovation system. That scammer then gives up on dating site A and heads on over to dating site B, another iovation client. Dating site B is able to identity that the device Fred is using has previously been involved with scamming abuse. Dating site B can then deal with the scammer appropriately, before scammer Fred ever has a chance to scam or abuse any of dating site B’s members.
I first started working with iovation in 2007. Since then we’ve signed up a good portion of the dating industry. The larger the network gets, the more valuable it becomes to the industry. We’ve gathered a few testimonials from iovation clients.
“Iovation’s system has allowed us to better protect our members from fraud using a fraction of the resources we used to devote to this problem. With their digital fingerprinting technology, we’ve been able to eliminate a lot of the guess work and tediousness involved in our risk management activities. Working with the Iovation team has also been a real pleasure and their consistent support has been very valuable to us.” – Alex Trottier, Director of Customer Retention
“Iovation has provided outstanding service and its support team worked with our technical team to integrate its effective and user-friendly platform on our free online dating site, YOUAND.ME, to help provide a more secure dating environment for our members.” – Steven Sikes, President and Founder of VisionSync, Inc.
“So far Iovation has been a great company to work with and very flexible. I’d give them an A rating on support for integration” – Anonymous Client
If you’re interested in a demo, you can contact iovation directly at 503-224-6010 or just email me, Mark Brooks, at mark@courtlandbrooks.com, and I’ll line up a demo for you.
