## See Spec's Customer Journey Security Platform Want to see how Spec locks down the cracks fraudsters and bots have been exploiting for years? In this self-guided tour, discover key features that fraud fighters love. #### You're one step away from touring Spec! # Case Study: Indiegogo protects brand reputation and revenue by stopping fraud at the gates ### Spec helped Indiegogo improve customer trust and reduce chargebacks by lowering the incidence of account takeovers. ### **Situation:** The popular crowdfunding platform company needed to reduce the incidence of account takeovers (ATOs) that resulted from credential stuffing attacks and prevent losses from fraud-related chargebacks. ### **Solution:** Indiegogo deployed Spec’s customer journey security platform, gained end-to-end journey visibility, and identified the root cause of fraudulent chargebacks: persistent credential stuffing that resulted in account takeovers. Attackers are now funneled into a poisoned honeypot preventing them from transacting and gaining intelligence about Indiegogo’s security and fraud defenses. Download the full [**Indiegogo case study**](/content/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Case-Study-Customer-Journey-Security-Marketplace.pdf) now to find out how you can reduce chargebacks with Spec. ### **Outcomes:** - **-90% attack pressure:** Reduced attack pressure by 90 percent over 6 months - **+9.8% good orders:** Increased good orders over 9 percent - **Chargebacks from 20% → 5%:** Chargebacks due to fraud fell from 20 to 5 percent - **Credential stuffing to < 1%:** Reduced credential stuffing attacks to less than 1 percent of site logins - **Engineers = 0:** Tested and deployed new fraud solutions without engineering resources - **Protected 100K customers:** Protected 100K compromised customer accounts ### **Indiegogo launches the tech that gets people talking** Founded in 2008, U.S.-based Indiegogo is one of the first-ever crowdfunding platforms. Thanks to a thriving community of more than 9 million backers across 235 countries and territories, Indiegogo has to date delivered more than 800,000 innovative ideas to market. Monthly, the Indiegogo website sees more than 10 million visitors and launches about 19,000 new campaigns. With Indiegogo, anyone can become an entrepreneur or an investor. This means it’s critical to the brand reputation that investors trust the authenticity of each campaign, and that entrepreneurs know they’re sending products to the people who backed their vision, not fraudsters. Moreover, the Indiegogo team takes seriously their responsibility to protect the customer journey from attackers at all points and to keep all customer data secure. ### **A directive to reduce chargebacks: Get to the root cause** The Indiegogo team loves to see a traffic spike on the platform—that is, if it’s the result of a newly-launched crowdfunding campaign. But like many popular websites, the platform is periodically the target of account takeover attacks due to credential stuffing. “Bot attacks are common on many websites,” said Senior Director Of Engineering, Adi Raghuwanshi. Some attacks were heavy and obvious, he said, and some went under the radar, only to be detected later when the customer complaints came rolling in. Another frustrating problem facing the business was a high volume of fraud-related credit card chargebacks. Each fraudulent transaction costs Indiegogo the amount of the refund plus a card issuer service fee of $15. And these costs were adding up. The five-person customer operations team, led by Payments Manager Justin Orme, was in a draining, reactive cycle of retroactive investigations and customer outreach. To start combating the problem, Orme’s team invested in a risk check product offered by another vendor. At the time of checkout, when the user is submitting their pledge, the vendor returns a transaction “confidence score.” If the score is within a certain range, the team manually reviews the charge and determines, based on available information, the likelihood of fraud. ### **Solution: Full customer journey visibility on a no-code platform** Working together, Orme and Raghuwanshi set out to evaluate new fraud vendors, seeking better point solutions that could give them broader fraud protection along the customer journey. In this quest, they learned about orchestration platforms which offer expanded visibility, better contextual data to inform risk decisions, and finely-tuned control over how a platform team responds to fraud and attackers. The Indiegogo team chose Spec over other vendors, in part because of the completeness of product vision and Spec’s team of fraud experts who understood the type of data, insights and actions that would reduce ATOs and fraud losses. For Raghuwanshi, a primary factor in choosing Spec was the ease at which Indiegogo could trial and pressure test different fraud point solutions without taking resources away from the engineering team. “Spec came out to be the most advanced in terms of the no-code approach to integrations,” he said. ### **Results: Critical insights that reduced ATOs and chargebacks** The benefits Indiegogo got after Spec were instantaneous. Immediately after the platform started analyzing Indiegogo’s site traffic, Spec identified automated credential stuffing behavior. Spec blocked attacks based on their signature, with little effort from the Indiegogo team. Chargebacks due to fraud are also way down, said Orme, from at times 20% of the total mix of chargebacks to consistently around 5%.