Using AI to Defend Account Fraud at Web Scale

Imagine you have a Slack channel for your cool SaaS product where every new sign up is posted. Finally one day, after endless growth marketing, you see a storm of new sign ups! You are so happy and it is great for a few weeks. Until you start seeing sign ups from fake emails and disposable ones. You start filtering out known disposable domains and add in an email scoring system but it's not perfect. You add all of these to feel safe but your user growth is now taking a hit. You spend more on marketing but get fewer genuine new users.

It's usually a similar story for logins. A few accounts are taken over and you start enforcing 2FA in every login. Your activation funnel suffers first, and then the total number of daily active users drop.

The problem is that you're using a traditional approach to solve a modern complex problem: account fraud at web scale. Fraud is, and has always been, a cat and mouse game. Fraudsters are intelligent beings who find new ways when you block the old ways. This is where AI and ML are truly needed because new patterns of fraud emerge every day.

In this talk, Amir will take you through the journey at CrossClassify to developing XAI (explainable AI) solutions for account fraud prevention. He will cover how user authentication methods can be enhanced using behavioural biometrics to implement a continuous authentication system that monitors user behaviour throughout a session. He will also explore anomaly detection techniques and deep learning approaches which work better in the fraud domain, where heavily imbalanced datasets are the norm.

About Amir:
Amir Moghimi is a software engineer by trade who is now CTO and co-founder of Whitefox Cloud Consulting (providing software architecture and development services) as well as CrossClassify (an AI startup in modern account fraud prevention). Amir has been helping many startups design and build their API-first MVSP (Minimum Viable Secure Product). Before that, he has worked as a solution architect and platform engineering lead for medium to large organisations such as Deloitte, Whispir, Nintex and MessageMedia. He is also a husband and father to a cheeky young boy.

Event schedule:
5:30 pm: Networking (30 mins)
6:00 pm: Presentation and Q&A (1 hour)
7:00 pm: Networking (30 mins)

Please Note: The meetup is now taking place at the Stair Stadium in the Precinct, which is accessed via the elevator on the ground-level.