Dennis Weiss Talks Why You Need Fraud Prevention Solutions

We live in a digital world, and with living in a space that is run by technology, you need to always be aware of frauds, fake accounts, chargebacks and malicious users who are out to get your money and you!

Dennis Weiss, the founder / CEO of IPQualityScore, is working towards making the world online safer in America, and is disrupting the crazy things these criminals will do and go through to get to you.

Through various tools in the fraud prevention space, Dennis explains to Disrupt what his platform and technology actually is doing. “First; we have a self-serve proactive tool set that is monitoring your online content 24/7. Next, we are also a data source. Thanks to this, we were the first ones to discover malicious activity within “residential proxies. Nowadays, residential proxies are a solid way to stay anonymous, but this makes it hard to detect fraudsters when they’re using them. Ten years ago, a residential proxy meant there was malware on your device and someone was hacking it to use your IP address and bandwidth. We discovered this by working with a well-known streaming platform. Our client was receiving payments from multiple countries, but the viewership was in the United States. That didn’t make sense, so we had to dig deeper. We discovered the users making these payments were using residential proxies and making them look like regular connections. Today, we’re still on the hunt to find all new and evolving fraud trends to help our clients protect their digital assets. Also, we offer limited free tools to help all online businesses fight fraud in real time.”

And as the pandemic brought forth a lot of challenges for companies – with many having to pivot and go online – fraud reports and scams are higher now than they ever have been before and propelled the cybersecurity industry, as outdated security systems were easily penetrated according to reports.

With an increase in demand, Dennis and his company are all set to fight back.

“Helping people and companies fight back against fraud is important to me because I’ve been there. Before IPQS, I had an advertising company where we were experiencing fraud firsthand. We realized there weren’t a lot of solutions in the market for fraud, so we came up with our solutions. People don’t realize there’s a lot of fraud out there. If you have a small business or an online company, it’s almost impossible for you to look out for fraud 24/7. That’s where IPQS solutions hop in to stop fraud 24/7. After all, fraud never sleeps and we’re fraud’s worst nightmare.”

So, what about all those old computer security programs and firewalls? Do they still work against the latest scams out there? And what are the biggest scams happening today we should look out for. We had to ask Dennis these burning questions.

“The top [scams] are phishing email and residential proxies. Phishing attempts are easily thwarted with our domain reputation API. While our IP reputation API filters out residential proxies! Phishing attempts are when you get an email that looks like a valid company and they try to get you to click a link or verify private information. Those emails are fake and you often are harvesting your private and personal information to resell on the dark web.  Residential proxies are when malicious users use your IP address as an intermediary server. Which masks them but puts you at risk. This helps them hide their own IP address and commit fraud. 

For your personal use, the best solution is to have a firewall in place. For business, using our tools at IPQS would help. We have tools such as email verification, phone validation, and IP Reputation. With that in place, we’re able to avoid malware and fraud in general.”