Digital frauds are hanging at the neck of companies with evolved fraudulent techniques adopted by fraudsters. Billions of dollars are lost in the market cap as companies' stock values experienced an average decline of 7.6% due to data fraud, merged with a mean market cap loss of $5.4 billion.

Fraudsters are continually evolving their techniques, making it increasingly challenging for companies to detect fraudulent activities before they occur. While businesses are striving to enhance their security measures, these efforts often create friction for customers, ultimately impacting the companies negatively.

However, as interactions over the internet are increasing day by day, individuals leave behind numerous digital footprints that can serve as a potent tool in the fight against fraud. These digital traces offer valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to conduct thorough digital footprint assessments. By leveraging these assessments, companies can access comprehensive customer data, empowering them to stay ahead of fraudsters and provide a more secure user experience.

The fraudulent attacks have left a significant impact on the finances and customer experiences of the organization. Two major aspects of customer experience are severely impacted after suffering fraud wherein satisfaction level is impacted at 77% and customer conversion effect rises to 78%

Juniper Research conducted a study on the merchant losses suffered by organizations due to payment fraud that concluded organizations are expected to lose more than $343 billion globally between 2023 and 2027.

Identity fraud scams added another $28 billion in losses, victimizing an additional 27 million U.S. adults. Major shifts in fraud tactics were observed, including a 109% increase in new account fraud and a 90% rise in account takeover losses.

The conventional methods of fraud detection are no longer effective considering the sophisticated threat measures adopted by fraudsters in today’s time leading to billions of losses incurred by companies.

The term “Footprint” is the mark or history each user leaves behind while spending time on the internet. It’s the data of the users that gets incorporated into their user history, also known as “digital shadow”.

Digital footprints are associated with the data of our online presence such as IP addresses, profiles on various platforms, online transactions and more things other than our real names. These could be the websites you’ve registered, your public posts and reviews on all sorts of platforms whether an ad or a forum.

These entail valuable and detailed insights for background verification of the user and authenticate the real identity to develop the credibility and trustworthiness.

Digital footprinting accumulates and detects your presence on various social media platforms through the association of email address and phone number that exhibit your likes, dislikes, reviews, posts and uploads, search history and various other advertent details associated with your identity authentication.

The above image is the representation of the information digital footprinting acquires and entail details through your email and contact information:

Identifying the presence of social media presence for user identification is essential as the absence of a digital footprint reflects on their social checks. Also, it isn’t easy to replicate or create a new account that qualifies for a strong verification check without any social presence.

Each client has a different parameter to analyse a user’s qualification for identity verification. With whatsapp being a prevalent platform considering its usage on personal levels by people all over the world, clients deter the importance of such platforms and mark the existence of such platforms essential for a user to qualify as legitimate or safe one. Their absence on such platforms adds to the further authentication details for verifying their identity as it gets marked as suspicious in respect to the parameters set for detecting a potential fraud or suspiciousness of an account.

Hence, the implementation of machine learning in the digital footprinting tool enables you to detect potential frauds acting as a time saver for manual checks. Integrating digital footprinting with your verification process will seamlessly stop the fraudulent intervention in conversion metrics. The implementation of digital footprinting has a transparent approach to customer data that prioritizes transparency and adaptability.

Integration of ML and AI has been effective in identifying customer insights with a detailed comprehension of data captured by the continuous monitoring of digital footprinting. Identifying the behavioral patterns of customers to detect any potential fraud is a seamless process rather than opting for conventional methods of detecting fraud.

However, technologies like AI and ML are creating innovative solutions to combat the chaos of fraudulent attacks. Digital footprinting goes beyond the usage of onboarding verification of customers, the tool holds more features that are furthermore comprehensive in assisting organizations to stop such instants that hamper the customer experience, ROI, and brand reputation:

For example, a slow onboarding process might make a customer agitated as the manual or conventional method of checking customer details to validate their identity is time-consuming. This may make the customer lose their interest in proceeding with account verification. But at the same time, it is vital to ensure complete data accuracy to validate whether the customer is safe to proceed with onboarding.

So, to ensure the safety and security of the platform and customer identity, digital footprinting proceeds with their comprehensive online data checks that ensure email duplication, phishing, and occurrence of shared password hashes among varied users that companies mostly fail to identify in the conventional method of verification.

Data accumulation of a customer's online presence gives a profound insight into the fraud score a customer entails with real-time detection of customer online behavioral patterns. It enables companies to understand the customers' desires and needs with a thorough check on their online presence and activities.

Hence the continuous monitoring of customer accounts makes it a hassle for the fraudsters to accomplish their plan of conducting a fraudulent attack on the account. The constant gauge of a customer’s ethnicity while extricating the potential fraudster with merely a phone number or email address is the competence of digital footprinting.

Analyzing and evaluating the digital footprint of your customers will help you comprehend their engagement and behavioral patterns for better marketing of your brand. Nevertheless, allowing you to eliminate any potential fraud and risks that lie ahead.