• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 6 hours ago

Brands suffering from payment fraud need look no further than their email list for a solution. Email addresses can provide powerful signals of looming theft, according to an analysis by AtData. 

But companies can flag suspicious transactions before they occur. According to AtData, these are key email signals of fraud risk: 

- Disposable email domains are frequently used to bypass identity verification; they show a fraud rate of more than 70%. 

- New address accounts created just days before a transaction were 25x more likely to be fraudulent. This is especially true in the lending space, where email addresses less than 30 days old showed a 35x increase in fraud risk. In addition, borrowers using newly created emails carried a 67.3% fraud rate in payment scenarios.

- Anonymized routing or VPNs should be especially concerning; transactions routed through international proxies are 3.7x more likely to be fraudulent, and the risk increases to 14.6x in lending. 

The takeaway?

"Bad actors are exploiting every gap in digital payments systems," says Diarmuid Thoma, head of fraud and data for AtData. "These findings reveal why static, rule-based fraud filters are not enough. Email data holds a wealth of behavioral and identity signals, and fraud strategies built on real-time, data-driven intelligence, especially at the email level, will help stay ahead of emerging threats and protect both platforms and customers."