Social media has connected the world in a way that’s unprecedented in human history. Unfortunately, it has also opened the doors to a lot of nefarious fraudulent activity. Social media intelligence tools identify and mitigate the damage of fraud.
By the very nature of social media, we share a lot of personal information. Unfortunately, fraudsters often scrape and use that information to impersonate us and commit crimes. And worse, not only individuals are being targeted. Fraudsters use social media accounts to scam companies out of money through fraudulent transactions as well.
In response to this, fraud security companies constantly develop and improve on their social media intelligence tools. They use these to verify identities and weed out phony accounts.
Learn the top 6 ways that companies employ social media intelligence tools today.
Top Uses for Social Media Intelligence
1. Customer Identity Verification
Social media intelligence tools offer modular and flexible verification methods to ensure the merchant that they deal with is a real person.
For instance, fraudsters often use stolen credit cards along with fake profiles to make purchases. They leave the merchant to foot the bill when the card is reported stolen. Fortunately, identity verification allows merchants to halt the transaction before any money or goods are exchanged with fake profiles.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience
On the flip side, social media intelligence identity verification enhances the customer’s transactional experience. By verifying the legitimacy of a customer’s profile using AI-powered automation, login and checkout processes are speedier and smoother for the customer.
Furthermore, using a social media intelligence platform also protects your customers from being scammed by impersonators and inadvertently sharing their login information.
3. Protection from Brand Abuse
Most organizations utilize some form of social media presence, and fraudsters are taking advantage of that.
For example, criminals often impersonate brand profiles and threaten the brand with fraudulent activity. Sometimes they try to sell the account back to the brand for a profit.
Occasionally they use the fake profile to damage the brand’s reputation in a variety of ways. This includes scamming potential customers, posting inappropriate material using the brand’s name, and communicating false information to influence a company’s share price.
4. Protect Customer Information
Fraudsters posing as a company also commonly collect customer information by tricking the customers into thinking they’re logging into the legitimate company site.
Once the criminals have obtained the customer login information, they’re able to access the customer’s profiles on the real company site and often obtain payment information as a result.
Or worse, they sometimes sell customer information to brand competitors for black hat marketing techniques.
However, social media intelligence tools include automated defensive techniques to seek out and identify imposter brand accounts before any real harm can be done.
5. Protect Engagement Metrics
Another example of fraudulent social media activity isn’t a human threat, but one involving bots.
Bot accounts number in the tens, hundreds, even millions across all social media platforms.
Often, fraudsters send out these fake social media profiles with a singular purpose. For example, they scam people into giving them money or obtain personal information. Frequently, they mess with engagement metrics for company posts.
By identifying these fake bot profiles, social media intelligence tools report them and block their activity on social media platforms.
6. Protection from Marketing Scams
Fraudster organizations sometimes pose as marketing organizations and contact brands with proposals for marketing strategy and implementation. This might seem like it would be easy to spot, but fraudsters are criminals who practice a craft and who can be very convincing when they need to be.
When the fraudulent organization and the victim organization strike a marketing deal, the criminals simply collect the money and vanish without a trace.
AI Powered Social Media Monitoring from Fraud.net
A comprehensive social media intelligence platform will be able to flag the fraudulent company’s social media presence and alert the potential victim company that something doesn’t seem right before any money changes hands.
Fraud.net offers a fully capable social media intelligence platform that can protect your brand, and your customers, from fraudulent activity. To find out how we can find a solution for your particular needs, get in touch with us today.