Device fingerprinting is a method of tracking devices in order to identify potential fraud. When used in conjunction with unique IPs, user agents and other data points, it can detect fraudulent behavior like a single account being shared across multiple devices, spoofing, emulators and similar patterns of abuse.
Unlike cookies, which can be easily deleted by users, device fingerprints are persistent and can be tracked from session to session. This enables a wealth of data to be collected, making device fingerprinting an increasingly useful tool in fighting online fraud.
To make the most of device fingerprinting, it’s essential to have an easy-to-use, robust API that provides high performance and flexibility. It should also adhere to security standards, ensuring the integrity of your customers’ personal and payment information. It’s also important to consider the future of the technology, ensuring it will remain secure and viable as new threats emerge.
A device fingerprint API should allow developers to build a system that can adapt to changing trends and needs. This is crucial, as fraudsters are always looking for ways to circumvent or hide detection. For example, many fraudsters are now using tools to obscure their device fingerprints, which can create a false picture of genuine customer activity. This can cause serious problems for businesses and their customers, as it’s likely that such behaviour will be flagged as suspicious.
To prevent this, a device fingerprint API should have the ability to identify and flag suspicious activities as they occur. This will help to prevent a business from being blindsided by suspicious patterns of behaviour and ensure that they’re not missing any fraudulent activity. It should also be easy to integrate with existing systems and tools to enable businesses to use device fingerprinting in their current workflows.
The best device fingerprint APIs will be able to capture a variety of data points, including unique IP addresses, user agent strings, browser and operating system versions, network details, clock skew, and more. They should be able to compare these against a database of fingerprints to identify devices that have already been identified as valid or potentially fraudulent.
Finally, a good device fingerprint API will be able to deliver real-time results in the form of a simple html snippet for injecting into a website. This will allow the fingerprint to be submitted in the Payment Product API call along with other fraud fields and risk assessment.
MyCheckout’s device fingerprinting service is seamlessly integrated into our hosted payment pages, enabling you to take advantage of this powerful, fraud prevention feature. The service uses multi-layered AI and machine learning to analyze users, transactions, ad traffic and other data to produce a confident fraud score. It can detect a range of fraud and security issues, such as duplicate accounts, spoofing, emulators, bots, GPS tampering and more. The service is available to all customers, and can be enabled in just a few clicks in the admin portal. To learn more, see the Device Fingerprinting FAQ’s and the detailed API docs below.