Challenge
Quickly stopping friendly fraud
Since the company was founded in 2009, GetYourGuide has seen extraordinary growth. However, as the range of attractions offered on the site and the number of daily transactions grew, GetYourGuide saw a corresponding increase in fraud. Chargebacks from card-not-present fraud and fraudsters using last minute bookings for nonrefundable products began to impact GetYourGuide’s bottom line. GetYourGuide has a unique model, in that there are three parties involved: the customer, GetYourGuide, and the ticket or event supplier. Time is of the essence when wrangling these stakeholders, and accurate data is required to maintain these relationships.
To combat fraud, GetYourGuide’s lean team started manually reviewing suspicious transactions. But this cumbersome process did little to reduce their fraud, and chargebacks remained debilitatingly common. With GetYourGuide, customers had the ability to purchase tickets minutes before walking into an event; this miniscule window of time made scalable and efficient manual review impossible. Even worse, GetYourGuide’s imprecise system for flagging and blocking suspicious transactions produced a high false positive rate. Honest users, frustrated and inconvenienced by slow service, began to complain.
GetYourGuide needed a new fraud solution that balanced automation with accuracy, that could grow as quickly as the company itself.