Service Objects Weblog

Service Objects’ Ongoing Dedication to Fighting Fraud

Hi everyone! As you probably know, Service Objects‘ goal as a company is to combat fraud and enhance and validate lead information. We do this with many different solutions, but one of our most effective solutions is our DOTS Lead Validation Web Service. I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about some of the exciting upgrades we have made to improve this service, and perhaps some of the things we are looking to do in the near future as well.

One of the interesting things that I run across as an engineer when working with leads, is the difference between a bad lead, and a badly filled-in lead. For example, a bad lead is created by someone intentionally providing fraudulent information, or filling in random garbage just to get something for free. A badly filled-in lead could be an honest and interested person, but perhaps they omitted key information, misspelled an address, or in general just made a mistake when filling in their information. DOTS Lead Validation looks at these types of leads skeptically, since any mistake could be an indicator of a lead that is less reliable than others. However, rather than outright failing these leads, we prefer to identify the problem, and then go on to fix and enhance the lead.

Our focus over the last month was to improve the address verification element within DOTS Lead Validation. In addition to our excellent address validation and and Delivery Point Validation (DPV) services within DOTS Lead Validation, fixing the addresses that are improperly formatted (addresses without spaces or gross spelling errors) is something that we have greatly improved. We continue to fix any inconsistencies, but now we also count those inconsistencies and report them back as warnings, so that our users will understand where the problems have occurred.

Other areas of DOTS Lead Validation improvement are in the email and IP address components. We have greatly sped up the rate at which email addresses are validated, as well as adding improved detection for problematic email addresses (e.g. identifying emails with box names that appear to be randomly generated). On the IP address side, identification for both proxy servers and high risk countries has been greatly improved, allowing Service Objects to assign larger penalties for questionable leads.

Areas of DOTS Lead Validation that we plan to improve in the near future include expanding the service to include other countries. We are happy to announce that DOTS Lead Validation support for Canadian leads should be available shortly. Additionally, one of our most important upcoming tasks will be the continued development of our disconnected phone number tests. We are confident that all of these efforts will continue to improve our DOTS Lead Validation service. Every lead verification test is important to us and we pride ourselves on finding things that no one else would to improve the quality of every lead.

Thanks for reading this week!

Jonas S.

Have questions for Jonas S.? Email him at communications@serviceobjects.com.

October 8, 2008 at 10:54 pm jfs1 Leave a comment