Fraud prevention 🛡️
Preventing fraud is crucial for your organization and Ethnio, but especially in the world of participant incentives. Not only do we not like survey fakers and professional scammers, but those people in your research studies can cause serious problems with quality findings.
Fraud prevention deep dive 🤿
For a more in-depth outline of how Ethnio approaches fraud prevention, we have a pretty detailed blog post on tips and tricks and all the measures we have in place.
📖 Read all about Ethnio's multi-layered fraud prevention and strategies →
Here's how we tackle fraud prevention effectively, and head to account > fraud prevention to control the options.
- Responses
- Incentives
- Pool
Responses
More information coming soon.
Incentives
Any incentive that is issued in Ethnio can be marked as suspicious if it meets any of our risk criteria outlined below. If you see the orange status, "Suspicious," next to any reward, there's no action required on your part, but that recipient will be in a review queue for our rewards team. They will review each one and either release or block that reward.
📧 The most common reason for suspicious flag: shared emails
If you've paid someone with an email like bob@a.com but they've redeemed reward using a different email like bobsrealemail@gmail.com , and that email is in turn associated with more than three other emails, that's a bad sign. That typically is a signal that someone has one email for receiving payments but is generating more than three other fake emails to qualify for multiple studies across all Ethnio customers and our network of incentive providers.
More detail below 👇
Understanding Fraud in Participant Incentives
Fraud in incentive programs can take many forms, including:
- Fake Participants: Individuals creating multiple accounts to claim incentives.
- Identity Theft: Using stolen email addresses or identities to participate in multiple studies.
- Inaccurate Information: Providing false information to qualify for studies.
Pool
Coming soon.
Criteria for flagging participants as suspicious
These are all the elements that go into marking a participant as suspicious:
- IP Address Tracking: We monitor IP addresses to detect and block multiple registrations from the same source.
- Device Fingerprinting: This technology helps identify unique devices, preventing multiple sign-ups from the same device.
- Network check: Ethnio checks with incentive providers and their customers to see if there's a history of fraud for any given email, IP, or device
- Shared or blocked emails: Any email that has been used as a secondary payment method email in multiple accounts will be flagged as suspicious.