Promotions reward your customers for their engagement and loyalty, and the benefits are well-known. 84% of consumers say they’re more likely to stick to brands that offer a loyalty program, and strategies like receipt marketing have a proven return on investment (ROI) for businesses. But with every well-intentioned promotion, there's an opportunity for exploitation.
Promotion fraud, also known as promotion abuse, is when consumers take advantage of your business offers. They might try to use offers or promotions repeatedly, provide misleading data like fake email addresses, or even use other customers’ promotional codes.
Receipt fraud is when customers steal, duplicate, or falsify receipts. This can happen when information on existing receipts is modified, new, fake receipts are produced, multiple people submit the same or similar receipt, out-of-date submissions, and a variety of other ways (AI tools will only make this easier to do).
Promotion fraud and receipt fraud can have a significant impact on your business. For example, PayPal had to shut down 4.5 million accounts in one year after discovering bad actors had hacked their rewards and loyalty program. Activity like this can be costly for large businesses, where even small financial losses quickly add up to large sums when perpetrated by thousands of fraudsters. So, staying aware of fraudulent receipt and promotion activity is important.
At Snipp, we’re leaders in receipt processing technology and consumer promotions and contest management, so we take anti-fraud measures seriously. We provide expert fraud detection and prevention solutions so you’re always hot on the heels of bad actors. Here are our best practice security measures to reduce the risks of receipt and promotion fraud in your business.
Receipts should include key information like:
Using these fields, fraud detection and prevention systems automatically flag incorrect or suspicious data submissions. Or, flag receipts for manual review if a combination of these fields appear on more than one receipt.
In most cases, customers must submit a photo of the receipt to claim a promotion or reward. At Snipp, our automated receipt technology captures info from the EXIF data within the photo file. If the EXIF data matches, our receipt OCR system moves it into manual review where the matching receipt is displayed.
Customer receipt photo submissions have ‘fingerprints’ within the photo. Fraud and detection prevention systems automatically digitize and compare images across the program's image catalog. If there are any matches, they’re moved into manual review, where the matching receipt is displayed.
At Snipp, our automated receipt validation technology flags users whose participation rates are outliers. A higher-than-average level of participation will automatically raise concerns. This person might receive a more significant number of rewards than normal, for example. Once flagged, our system marks all customer submissions for manual validation to help maintain compliance.
Finally, using advanced machine learning algorithms, you can manage receipt and promotion fraud at both an activation and validation level across multiple channels. Some examples of these different channels include:
Fraud DetectionBeyond receipt and activity data, there are softer fraud indicators to look for.
Patterns of behavior can signify receipt and promotion fraud. Fraud detection and prevention systems can recognize these patterns. Algorithms observe specific patterns in any campaign, such as a spike in receipts from a specific retailer. A sudden increase in participation, despite no scheduled marketing event, could indicate fraudulent activity. See details about our fraud and prevention systems here.
Bad actors leave a trail of hidden data in their submissions, email and IP addresses, photographs, and more that are easy to spot with the right tools. At Snipp, we help you uncover this data with leading automated receipt technology – you're risk of financial loss from fraudulent activity remains low. Contact us today to get started with our solutions.