Implementing an effective fraud prevention system is one of the top priorities for businesses that operate online web or mobile platforms. Businesses report millions of dollars of lost revenue each year due to fraud. Platform abuse and fraud prevention largely remain reactive and is achieved by studying the profile behavior and transaction history of a user after they sign up. This approach is often manual, time-consuming and expensive.

Early detection and prevention of fraudulent account sign-ups on online platforms using artificial intelligence (AI) is an effective defense mechanism for combating fraud and abuse.

This post shows how you can use Amazon Fraud Detector in real time along with Amazon Cognito custom authentication workflows to prevent fake account sign-ups. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that can identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. Plus, you can use it without the need for any prior machine learning (ML) expertise. Unlike general-purpose ML packages, Amazon Fraud Detector is designed specifically to detect fraud.

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in and access control to your web and mobile applications quickly and easily. It’s serverless and can scale up to millions of users. Anjan also discusses how you can use Amazon Pinpoint to track user sign-up flow events via user journeys and categorize users into segments. This is extremely useful for user profiles and activity analysis in order to run effective marketing or promotional campaigns while maintaining a quality user experience.

In its general design, the solution uses an Amazon Fraud Detector supervised ML model along with a customized Amazon Cognito sign-up workflow to implement a real-time new user fraud prevention mechanism for online web and mobile applications. It also uses Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda to customize the Amazon Cognito sign-up workflow.

Amazon Pinpoint enables businesses to communicate with their customers using popular channels like email, SMS, voice and push notifications. With Amazon Pinpoint, you can also create segments of marketing campaign audiences. Without early fraud prevention for sign-ups, businesses must analyze all user profiles with the same lens. Findings of such analyses are then used to create appropriate audience segments for new user marketing or promotional campaigns. This approach often introduces overhead that takes time away from effectively engaging with customers, especially when dealing with large volumes of user data. For example, businesses may want to run marketing and promotional campaigns for new users with low sign-up risk scores.

Events within the Amazon Cognito sign-up flow can also be sent to Amazon Pinpoint so businesses can create customer journeys. An Amazon Pinpoint journey, as illustrated in the following diagram, is a multi-step engagement experience that can be tailored to fit the overall marketing strategy of the business.

Be sure to view the full AWS Big Data article by visiting the link here. Anjan walks through the entire setup of Amazon Fraud Detector as well as useful deployment requisites.

Alternatively, if you’d like assistance with setting up fraud detection within your own user journey or have questions surrounding Amazon Cognito, AWS Lambda, Amazon Pinpoint or Amazon DynamoDB, please get in touch.