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Tripping Up a Travel Fraudster with Pipl

by Admin on Sep 25, 2017

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Fraud is prevalent in the travel industry. As much as 10% of stolen credit cards are used on travel purchases. For travel agencies in particular this is a problem since they are on the hook for the total amount of a fraudulently purchased ticket. This means they must keep fraud-revenue ratios very low – below 1% to ensure that fraud doesn’t significantly eat into their profit margin. Currently, between 1% and 2 % of travel agency revenue is used to manage fraud.

The following fraud scenario is one that a travel agency is likely to face: A man contacts an agency with a demand for four tickets to an international destination due to a medical emergency. The caller ID on the phone displays a local number and he emails a copy of his driver’s license a proof of identity. The travel agent issues the tickets, but they are purchased with a stolen credit card and are sold onward to the four travelers

In truth, the caller isn’t local, but is from Nigeria and created a digitally manipulated driver’s license to use in the scam and bought the stolen credit card.

How could this have been prevented using Pipl?

  • The travel agency could have used a reverse phone search with Pipl’s search engine. This would have shown that the name of the person provided was not connected to the phone number used in the call.
Reverse phone search reveals phone number belongs to different person.
Reverse phone search reveals phone number belongs to different person.
  • A reverse email search of the email used to send the driver’s license and receive the tickets would show either a relatively new email address or one unconnected to the person who made the purchase.
Email search shows recently created email was used
Email search shows recently created email was used.

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  • A search for the person on Pipl limited to the region where they claimed to be from would have turned up no results, marking the purchase as likely to be fraudulent

Using Pipl’s reverse phone search is important because most bookings for agencies still occur by phone. Despite this, among mid-size agencies between $1M and $10M in revenue only 28% currently use telephone number verification or reverse lookup. Stand out from the crowd by using Pipl’s search engine to prevent travel fraud.
Topics: Ecommerce

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