Overview

What is a Payout?

A payout, or a disbursement, is a payment made from a platform to a supplier on that platform. Examples include:

• Daily/weekly payment to a taxi driver on a taxi app of earnings less fees
• Payment of royalties to a rights holder on a music platform
• Ad revenue sharing payments to creators on a social media platform

What is payout fraud?

Payout fraud occurs when suppliers in marketplaces and online platforms manipulate the system to create fake revenue. They might commit money laundering, sidestep financial regulations, form fraudulent networks with other suppliers, bypass Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, and ultimately harm your business financially and legally.

How Ravelin protects against payout fraud

We aim to curb payout fraud by analysing each payout before it’s processed. By producing a recommendation, we guide you on whether to proceed with a particular transaction.

To do this, we ask you to send us details about each payout attempt via our API.

Our recommendations are generated using a combination of methods including:

• Rules and Payout Conditions:
  You can use our advanced rules engine to enforce business policy and implement safeguards against payout fraud. We calculate features based on the payout, payment method, and device data, which are enriched for further intelligence and offer them as conditions. These conditions can then be used in rules to mitigate fraud risks. Prior to deployment, rules can be tested to ensure they function as expected.
• Machine Learning:
  Over time we will collect evidence of payout fraud and monetisation abuse. Once we have enough data we will produce a machine learning model capable of identifying payout fraud.

Ravelin continuously monitors the performance of rules and recommendations and suggests any improvements.

Our payout fraud recommendations can be used in combination with other Ravelin products to help prevent wider fraud.

• Payment Fraud
  Some fraudsters might use stolen cards for purchases on platforms where they’re also sellers, facilitating a legitimate transfer of illicit funds to their accounts.

• Supplier Fraud
  Supplier fraud occurs when suppliers abuse policies or fraudsters pose as genuine sellers to illegitimately enrich themselves. Common tactics include creating fake customer accounts, hijacking genuine orders, inflating fees by faking or cancelling orders, and collaborating with fraudulent customers to use stolen cards for payment fraud.

• Voucher Abuse
  Misuse of promotional campaigns is another tactic. Fraudsters might leverage these to inflate their revenue without genuine sales.

Payout recommendations must be enabled on your account before they can be used. Please speak to your account manager about enabling payout recommendations.

Next steps

Request a payout fraud recommendation

Update us with the payout outcome

Test your integration

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