Content fraud plays the oldest tricks in the proverbial book. Because fraudulent content relies on victim-baiting, it undermines community integrity and kills growth no matter the industry—putting average consumers, and the businesses they buy from, at special risk of attack from scammers phishing for data.
A merchant’s customers almost always serve as the first touchpoint for fraudsters leveraging content to bypass security measures on a website. Following a fraudulent link or listing exposes users’ personal and payment information—which cybercriminals can sell on the dark web or collect themselves. This gives fraudsters the ability to take over user accounts, extract stored points or credit, buy goods using stolen cards, test batches of hijacked credential and payment data at scale using automation, create fake profiles and scam content that nets more valuable info, profit off the sale of non-existent products on user-to-user marketplaces, and in general, perpetuate the Fraud Economy. Furthermore, when you factor in the case that 2 out of 3 users admit to using the same credentials across different platforms, it is quickly evident that such scams have an exponential impact.
This global ecosystem of abuse and bad actors is thriving, too. Blocked content fraud jumped 28% from 2021 to 2022 across Sift’s global network, with 62% of consumers reporting that they encounter scams more frequently than any other type of fraudulent content. Businesses can’t…
