Enabling Signal Intelligence for API and hybrid customers

  • Updated

SheerID's goal is to verify consumers eligibility so you can deliver targeted promotions to the right audience. This requires a delicate balance between creating a smooth verification process for legitimate customers while having appropriate offer protection to block bad actors from exploiting your offer.

To protect your offer from abuse while ensuring the verification process is optimized for conversions, SheerID has built out an adaptive offer protection approach. With Signal Intelligence, you allow our platform to assess the risk of abuse on your program, enabling smarter, real-time protection actions.

What is Signal Intelligence?

Signal Intelligence

SheerID has partnered with the best-in-class signal intelligence vendors to help us identify fraudulent patterns and behaviors when verification forms are submitted by professional fraudsters, thereby preventing fraud without negatively impacting the experience for legitimate consumers. This is achieved by analyzing a broader range of data points, including device fingerprinting, device IDs, email address age, and online usage frequency.

Standard Signal Intelligence

The standard settings leverages a single source for third-party risk signals and device fingerprinting. It is strong for detecting common IP address, email, and location risks so SheerID can provide broad coverage and surface known fraud patterns.

Advanced Signal Intelligence

The advanced settings utilizes two sources for third-party risk signals and device fingerprinting, providing more robust protection against professional fraudsters. It is strong in device identity intelligence, identifying device spoofing, emulators, and cross-network links between fraudulent users. This version is enriched with global consortium data, providing maximum coverage.

The following steps must be performed before verification data is submitted. Ideally these steps are performed when the form is initially loaded. If the call to sheerIdUtils.determineDevice is performed right before the form data is submitted it can result in our system failing to collect signal data.

Perform the following 3 steps when your form loads:

Device data

  1. Import the sheerid-utils.js script into your page:

    <script src="https://cdn.jsdelvr.net/npm/@sheerid/jslib@1/sheerid-utils.js"></script>

  2. Generate a Verification ID

  3. Call determineDevice to enable SheerID to collect data for Signal Intelligence:

    window.sheerIdUtils.determineDevice("{verificationId}", "{programId}");

The determineDevice function enables our system to collect the necessary data. It does not return any data to the client.

Important: The call to determineDevice must be performed when the form is loaded. If determineDevice is called when the form is submitted it will result in data being collected inconsistently.

IP Address

Sending SheerID the consumer's IP is crucial when combatting sophisticated fraudsters. Many of the benefits of using SheerID's Signal Intelligence rely on the consumer's IP address to detect fraudulent patterns. In order to pass SheerID the consumer's IP address, simply use the ipAddressExtended property in your verification request, found here.

Once you complete the steps above, your program will start collecting Standard Device Signals. To enable Advanced Signal Intelligence, the necessary Data Processing Agreement (DPA) language must be in place and a SheerID engineer will have to enable Advanced Signals. Please reach out to your CSM if you have questions about your specific contract status.

Requirements for Signal Intelligence:

  • 2.0 program (not available for 0.5 programs)
  • Must collect consumer IP address and device data
  • Customers must submit data using a pre-generated verification ID. They cannot use the programId to submit consumer data

Submission Endpoint Examples:

Good Endpoint: /rest/v2/verification/{verificationId}/step/collectStudentPersonalInfo

Bad Endpoint: /rest/v2/verification/program/{programId}/step/collectStudentPersonalInfo

Contact your CSM for more information about offer protections on your SheerID program, or reach out to SheerID Product Support.

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