PCM vol. 3 Issue 9

THOUGHT LEADERS CORNER
Edoardo Fiorentini
Risk Management Expert
Edoardo Fiorentini, known as Edo in the industry, is a risk expert with
years of experience with some of the biggest players in the market.
After publishing this book, he co-founded AI Detection, the smart fraud
prevention that regroups all e-commerce buyers, sellers and solution
providers to build a safer web.
The book is a collection of fraudulent methods and the most
obvious ways to prevent them. If there is even a single point
in the book that makes you want to go back to your office and
implement something, then you may need additional help
from some of the leading companies out there.
If you just had some laugh instead and nodded in few chapters,
congratulations, either you are not the responsible of a risk
prevention department, or you already knew it all!
This book is not a guide but it may still teach a couple of things.
Hopefully on how to protect your business better.
Of course, names, places and companies had to be redacted to
protect the innocents!
I’ve asked few friends to write a story about a smart fraudster,
how they did it, how they caught him. Many decided to go
public with their full name. Others smelled possible issues
with their companies and opted to be anonymous. Regardless
of their specific name, you have few of the best stories out
there, written by experts who are leaders of their markets. I
want you to understand how smart fraudsters failed and I’m
not challenging any fraudster here, I know how good they can
be, but the others?
The messages are simple:
To my colleagues: watch out! You need to get better.
To the wannabe-fraudsters: don’t even bother trying!
Of course, AI is the vibe of the moment. Everyone has it or
is planning to implement it. You can imagine my face when
I asked for clarifications and got fed back a ML description.
An Artificial Intelligence can LEARN and guess what, it’s a
Machine. But then it will follow what it wants to do.
I know that if I need a smart robot, I won’t give him too much
freedom (Terminator anyone?), but if the AI is designed to be
interested in something.
The last few weeks saw me busy finding the right path towards
this direction. An AI who thinks freely. An AI who can request
access to different sources — “to check an idea”. An AI who
can properly give a risk score based not only on data, but on
intelligence. And I want it to be free for all the ones who can’t
really afford an external provider.
The first results are so encouraging that we had to check
multiple times that were correct.
If AI is the way to go, it becomes as important as having the
right fraud analyst to support its continuous training.
Therefore, I added few articles published before on the subject.
You need to remember that your people are your treasure,
your richness, the historical knowledge of your platform. Let
them read my book if you think will help and hear them out.
They may actually have some good ideas for your business!
I doubt this will be the winning approach if we don’t get better
in detecting and preventing fraud. I heard talking about
Machine Learning and few more innovative solutions. I also
tested few solutions and indeed, if you still have an old IBM
System from 1980, these represent awesome improvements.
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