How is this different from what the credit card companies provide? Or do they really not provide that service or only do it on the backend (post transaction)?
(I don't like advertising on these threads, but since somebody asked me directly I'll reply.)
Credit card companies protect consumers, but not merchants. When you call up your bank to report that a transaction was fraudulent, the credit card company reverses the transaction and withdraws the money from the merchant's account. That reversal, called a chargeback, can occur months after the original sale. Merchants can lose thousands, even millions, of dollars per month due to chargebacks.
That means anybody who sells stuff online needs a way to detect fraud on their site in real time, and that's what Sift Science does.
It looks like it might be different from checking for monetary fraud. It almost seems like it monitors activity on your website to determine any abnormal activity?
Maybe it's more along the line of loss prevention positions at a retail store, which monitor customers' behavior in-store, and follow the ones that look suspicious. Applied to web activity, it seems like it might yield interesting results...
