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Tremendous debuts fraud prevention tool for rewards sphere

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 — 12:03:26 (EDT)

NEW YORK, NY - April 17, 2024 - Tremendous, an incentives and rewards platform, recently announced the launch of its AI-driven fraud prevention feature. Tremendous fraud prevention leverages a multi-layered approach to combat several different types of fraud schemes and stop false transactions before companies lose money. This feature is the first and only fraud prevention tool in the incentives and rewards industry, equipping businesses with advanced fraud controls to prevent millions in annual losses at the hands of bad actors.

“We created our fraud prevention feature in response to unearthing more than $250,000 in false redemptions on a single campaign by a marketing agency,” said Kapil Kale, co-founder and COO of Tremendous. “Our client didn’t see the level of ROI they expected and asked us to investigate. We learned that nine PayPal accounts had received more than 10 awards from the company, with some of the top fraudsters redeeming over $40,000 in rewards. We immediately set out to build a product that would protect all of our clients and prevent all bad actors from ever being able to strike again.”

On average, companies across industries lose 5% of their gross revenue to fraud each year. Fraudsters continually evolve their methods and patterns for extracting money from businesses, and their tactics are only becoming more sophisticated and difficult to spot. Tremendous fraud prevention is built to detect fraudulent recipients regardless of methodology by assessing rewards according to a number of parameters, including:

Number of rewards redeemed

Dollar amount redeemed

Recipient country

IP address

A global flag list, populated by known fraudsters identified across millions of payouts in the Tremendous network

“We recognize that blocking erroneous or unintended reward redemptions ultimately sends less volume across our Tremendous platform, but it’s 100% the right thing to do. Protecting our customers from this egregious behavior is good business and critical for the industry. We’re happy to be able to establish the standard,” said Kale.

Tremendous’ fraud prevention feature flags suspicious transactions and presents them to account admins for review. Admins can quickly approve legitimate rewards and block apparent fraudsters. The review queue displays relevant recipient and reward data, including IP address, country, redemption history, and running totals to give admins all the information they need to make a confident decision about whether to block or release a payout.

The feature has been in beta testing with select Tremendous customers since January 2024. Based on performance in beta testing, the feature is projected to stop nearly $13M in fraud within the first year after launch. Transaction data showed the largest vector of fraud to be account cycling stemming from Nigeria and Indonesia, where criminals are creating fake profiles and completing surveys or promo actions hundreds of times to collect incentives.

"The feature has flagged scammers for us based on country. It's saved us a ton of frustration. And we can trust scammers won't profit off our research budget anymore”, said Oliver Moadel, VP at Q-Insights.

Tremendous fraud prevention will become widely available to Tremendous clients in the coming weeks. For more information on fraud prevention, please visit: www.tremendous.com/products/fraud-prevention/

Fraud prevention is free to use and available to all enterprise Tremendous clients.

About Tremendous

Tremendous is the simplest way for businesses to send rewards and payouts to over 200 countries. Recipients can choose from over 2,000 redemption options, including prepaid Visa cards, Venmo, PayPal, direct deposit, charitable donation, and specific gift cards to more than 1,000 retailers. Over 10,000 companies, including Google, Visa, and MIT, use Tremendous to send hundreds of millions of dollars in employee bonuses, research incentives, referral rewards, and more. And the platform is free to use – you only spend what you send.

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Source: Company press release.