With more than 7.9 billion active email accounts worldwide,1 an individual’s email address is a critical component of their digital identity and a valuable data point for fraud risk analysis. Fraud risk analysis for emails provides unique insights into transaction history and behavior, making them key for identifying suspicious activity. Incorporating email analysis into an identity verification service can help to improve fraud detection and customer experiences without adding friction to the user experience.

To identify potentially fraudulent activity, an email risk score considers a variety of factors in association with an email, such as social media data, the date the domain name was registered, and Google Dorking to determine how long it’s been since an email has been used. A low confidence score indicates the email may be linked to a compromised account or has been used by fraudsters, and can trigger additional authentication steps.

Fraud Risk Analysis for Emails: Identifying Suspicious Messages

Among the many attributes considered, an email’s age is one of the most powerful indicators for fraud. Research has shown that an email address less than 30 days old is 25x more likely to be associated with payment fraud compared to addresses that have been in use for longer periods of time. In addition, if an email is linked to a disposable domain or free email services, these can be strong signals for fraud as they’re frequently used to bypass identity verification and commit one-time abuse.

Email risk scoring is available to all LexisNexis IDMatrix customers and can be matched with other data sources, including credit score,s to provide a single, actionable risk score across multiple channels and customer touchpoints.