Tilores for market research companies: reducing fraud by detecting duplicates.

Our client* is a quantitative market research company that provides insights to companies from all over the world. With multiple brands, proprietary technology and several million research participants, our client delivers objective results with both customised research design and standardised market research methods.

Fraudulent Survey Participants

Our client pays survey participants to take part in market research surveys, and naturally wants to provide the highest quality research results to their customers. 

Due to the financial incentives offered for survey participation, some participants will attempt to make multiple accounts so that they can repeatedly participate in the same survey and earn multiple rewards for completing the same survey.

To try to reduce fraud, the company’s customer support team would review survey participants to look for duplicate accounts. Their tech team developed algorithms to look for account similarity, but these could not be automated, meaning that the customer support team spent too long manually reviewing customer accounts. 

With the increasing number of survey participants signing up to the company and the significant time spent handling fraud detection, it was time to look for a scalable solution to automate the detection of duplicate customer accounts. 

Partnering with Tilores

“We wanted to really catch duplicate survey participants before they start the survey. Typically with our manual review process we don’t catch them until later, by which point we have already paid them, so it is better to catch them at the start. I was thrilled to find Tilores, as I needed a solution that would automate the review of our survey participants as it was taking more and more time manually and was actually not possible to cross-reference new accounts against all of our existing survey participants.”

 - Product Developer at our client company. 

Tens of thousands of new participants sign up to the company every month. Within a day of turning on Tilores, 2000 fraudulent duplicate accounts were detected.

“To me, this was a surprise that Tilores detected so many duplicate accounts so quickly. These were duplicates that we could never have found ourselves.”

Our client’s tech team easily connected their survey participant sign-up flow to Tilores’ API so that new participant signups are checked against all existing several million participants. If a duplicate participant is detected, this account can be flagged for manual review by customer support, before any pay-out is made.

Especially useful for our clienth, is the ability of Tilores to automatically scale without any manual input, as when fraudsters target them, they often do so in coordinated waves, meaning they have a large number of participant sign-ups in a short period of time. Also, when especially daring fraudsters contact the company’s customer support department to ask where their survey payment is, the customer service agent has all the necessary information to hand to decline the pay-out. 

With Tilores’ identity resolution technology at their side, our client now has a fraud  -detection solution that will scale with their business, no matter how many survey participants are signing up. 

Key Metrics

“Tilores has been a great help because we now really don’t have to worry about fraud management and detection, which used to be a manual task.”

*our client's name is redacted at their request.