A Boise Anti-Fraud Company Watches Business Grow 350 Percent

Boise-based anti-fraud company Kount has watched its business grow by more than 350 percent in the last year.  That’s according to an article from the Idaho Business Review.

“Fraud, especially credit card fraud, is nothing new in the marketplace, but it has only been a recent development that third-party companies focused specifically on Internet transactions have shown the potential to become behemoths in the industry.

While the technology has gotten far more complex, the dynamic is still simple, said Don Bush, marketing director for Kount.

“What fraudsters try and do is mask who they are, they don’t want anybody to know who they are,” he said. “Our technology basically takes that mask off.”

The company has patented several technologies, such as a way to “fingerprint” which devices — smartphones, laptops or other electronic devices — a customer is using and track them for fraud use, to create several layers of fraud detection tools that can finger the bad guys, Bush said.” – Idaho Business Review

The Business Review reports there are fewer than a dozen companies like Kount, all of which are growing rapidly.  It says that growth is due largely to need.

“In 2011, there were $3.4 billion in losses in the United States and Canada resulting from online fraud perpetrated on merchants, according to statistics kept by the Merchant’s Risk Council. That’s double what the losses were a decade ago, mostly due to a huge increase of in electronic commerce.

Those losses represent about 1 percent revenues for companies doing business in North America, according to the Merchant’s Risk Council.” – Idaho Business Review

You can read the full story here.