Online Dating Platform Ghosts Fraudsters by Using Arkose Labs + AWS

Summary

One of the largest online dating platforms in the world encountered serious issues with bad actors who were creating fraudulent accounts or taking over genuine accounts to target consumers with spam and abuse. This led to customer dissatisfaction and potential brand damage. The platform adopted Arkose Bot Manager, Arkose Labs’ patented platform that combines defense-in-depth detection with dynamic attack response to catch attacks before they can make an impact. Arkose Labs leverages a comprehensive range of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including strategic data center locations, to enhance the security of websites and applications globally.

The collaboration between Arkose Labs and AWS led to a significant decrease in the creation of fake accounts and account takeovers, curbing subsequent fraud and abuse. As a result, the dating platform maintained a seamless consumer experience, crucial for fostering user trust and satisfaction.

The Business Problem

The popularity and simplicity of the client’s platform made it a prime target for fraudsters. Specifically, The collaboration between Arkose Labs and AWS led to a significant decrease in the creation of fake accounts and account takeovers, curbing subsequent fraud and abuse. As a result, the dating platform maintained a seamless consumer experience, crucial for fostering user trust and satisfaction. bad actors were creating fake accounts at scale and then scamming legitimate consumers on the platform. Additionally, they were engaging in account takeover (ATO) attacks, using stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to existing accounts. Fraudsters would then send messages to real users, inviting them to click malicious links, asking them for money, or engaging in phishing schemes.

The dating platform wanted to preserve the customer experience and ease of use that it was known for, while at the same time rooting out the creation of these fake or compromised accounts. While fraudulent activity could ultimately be identified downstream, it needed a stronger line of defense that proactively monitored the account registration and login stages. This also needed to be achieved with no negative impact on good consumer throughput, preserving the quick and easy signup and login processes.

The Arkose Labs Solution

Arkose Labs utilizes a holistic strategy to combat new account fraud. Arkose Bot Manager is the most advanced technology in the industry, proactively identifying attackers and delivering adaptive responses. It leverages more than 125 signals as it gathers and processes digital intelligence from various sources such as devices, networks and locations, helping to construct detailed user profiles.

This process is enhanced by data from the Arkose Global Intelligence Network, which allows Arkose Labs customers to benefit from global risk signals and mitigation strategies across multiple industries. By merging all this data with multiple signals, like advanced behavioral analytics, to identify telltales of fraudulent activity, the system effectively discerns user intentions and risk levels, subsequently assigning risk profiles to each user.

This approach enables genuine consumers to log in and sign up for the dating platform smoothly. But when it proactively detects suspicious activity, the approach dispenses an Arkose MatchKey suite of challenges, which are designed to be particularly complex for bots to solve. This results in attackers either abandoning their efforts or resorting to human fraud farms and manual attacks, which are also effectively countered by Arkose MatchKey challenges.

This integrated, multi-tiered approach allows Arkose Labs to efficiently mitigate both automated and sophisticated targeted attacks, thereby ensuring a secure online experience globally. Additionally, through the AWS partnership, Arkose Labs was able to create infrastructure that is highly available, responsive, and capable of handling network and system failures at a very high scale.

Arkose Bot Manager, in combination with AWS WAFv2 and AWS CloudFront, significantly enhances security for customers running on AWS by leveraging advanced bot detection and mitigation from Arkose Labs alongside AWS’s native security capabilities. AWS WAFv2 provides customizable rules and managed rule groups for bot control, allowing for precise traffic filtering and real-time threat response. CloudFront’s global content delivery network and built-in DDoS protection (AWS Shield) ensure secure and efficient traffic distribution, SSL/TLS termination and edge security. This integrated solution ensures that malicious traffic is identified and blocked early, protecting web applications from bot attacks and other threats while maintaining high performance and availability.

The Results

Deploying Arkose Bot Manager at the account registration and login stages had an immediate positive effect, with the dating platform able to identify bad actors proactively and early on. Fraudsters were faced with a greater effort to complete each registration or sign-on, and this disincentivized them from creating fake accounts or taking over legitimate ones.

Additionally, Arkose Bot Manager passed data signals back to the platform that helped identify returning fraudsters with a high degree of accuracy. The company could also use these insights to ban bad users and identify them if they returned to the platform later, thus reducing future abuse. This approach successfully thwarted both automated and targeted attacks by fraudsters before they could connect with genuine users to scam them.