We just came back from Vegas and we’re pleased to announce that we were one of the ten winners of the Money20/20 Hackathon! As you may recall, we were quite excited about all the proposed challenges, since the Kill Bill platform was a great fit for pretty much all of them. We finally decided to go with Feedzai, and work on fraud detection. Antonio, who flew from Lisbon for the event, was very helpful in explaining how Feedzai’s machine learning algorithms work behind the scenes, and how they leverage data from the entire ecosystem, from banks to merchants, to fight the bad guys. For our hackathon project, we decided to tell the story about Pedro, a Yerba Maté enthusiast, who runs a subscription-based online forum on the topic. He is quickly facing fraud though, as people are using his sign-up flow to test stolen credit cards. Fraudsters, who have databases of credit cards and want to sell them to other fraud rings, need to determine which ones are still valid: these sell at a much higher price on the black market. One way to do it is to sign-up to online services, which authorize then void the credit card before storing it for recurring payments. This is quite costly for him, because he has to pay for each authorization as well as potential chargebacks down the line (because fraudsters don’t bother canceling the subscription when it goes through). In our demo, we show how we can leverage both Feedzai and cash-based payment methods on top of the Kill Bill platform, to prevent fraud, while mitigating the risk of blocking legitimate...
