What makes SEON's Device Fingerprinting unique?

What has every movie and novel in the history of crime stories taught us about investigating a crime scene? That the very first thing you need to look for is fingerprints, one of the most reliable identifiers of suspect.

With the advancement of technology, some crimes have gone digital. Luckily, so have fingerprints. Device fingerprinting is a method commonly used to prevent cybercrime, including online fraud, and is fully embraced by SEON as part of our efforts to catch fraudsters before they damage your business.

Simply put, device fingerprinting is the process of collecting information about the device a customer is using to access your service. When doing so, the device they are using has to share numerous pieces of information with your servers to display the site or app properly.

This includes practical data points like the screen resolution, what fonts are available in the browser, and more technical ones, such as the browser version and cookie preferences.  SEON then also creates several unique IDs called hashes for each configuration in order to recognize connections between users and highlight suspicious devices. When the user action originates from an Android or iOS device, you get one unique hash, while the transactions coming from desktop browsers will get multiple different hashes to make identifying them as accurate as possible.

Learn more: See how SEON’s device fingerprinting feature can help you prevent fraud in our detailed overview.

While device fingerprinting can be used for different purposes, SEON’s solution is tailor-made for fraud prevention. Our partners across the iGaming and e-commerce industries, among others, use it to block bonus abuse or multi-accounting attempts and more.

Unlike other device fingerprinting tools focused on marketing or other generic use cases, SEON’s solution is specifically designed to filter out suspicious users and activities.

Plugins and browsers typically used by fraudsters to block or spoof device fingerprinting can cause a lot of headaches. The good news is that identifying customers using these can already help you filter out potential fraudulent activity. We'll also flag if a privacy tools is used. While not concrete evidence of any wrong doing in itself, together with other data points and suspicious details it can reveal a fraudster.

We also utilize our ever growing experience in fighting fraud with device fingerprinting to identify and categorize suspicious browser profiles and factor this knowledge into creating our default rules.

That's not all: beyond the default rules you get on day one with SEON, you can add any device fingerprinting data point to your custom rules for a fully customized fraud fighting experience. 
 

With SEON’s device fingerprinting, you get more than just a hash: for web, you get three! Needless to say, when it comes to catching fraudsters, information is power. The more information you can gather, the better chances you'll have in filtering out and blocking any malicious activities.

Hashes will change from time to time, depending on their sensitivity to changes on the users' device. Nevertheless, having separate cookie, browser and device hashes can help shield your business.

Learn more: Want to know how hashes work and what can change them? Read our in-depth overview.

You can unleash the true power of SEON’s unique device fingerprinting solution by customizing SEON to your specific needs. It’s simple: use any device fingerprinting data point to build custom rules in our Scoring Engine and block fraudsters from doing any damage.

Even better, getting started with device fingerprinting in SEON is a breeze: you’ll find all available data points together with the hashes in the Devices & OS Widget under Transaction Details.

You can start by creating custom rules using the cookie, browser and device hashes. Once you get more comfortable with customizing SEON to your needs, you can also formulate bespoke rules based on individual device fingerprinting data points to target fraud types unique to your business.

Learn more: Get the most out of SEON’s device fingerprinting feature and start the integration today!