Challenge
Preserving customers' trust
As a social marketplace for travelers, Travelmob’s customer experience is key—it means a positive brand experience, repeat business, new users, and continued growth. That’s why the company was particularly worried about stopping a growing trend of bad users posing as legitimate hosts, posting photos of properties they didn’t own, and trying to con unsuspecting guests into making their payment offsite.
Jan Hecking, Principal Software Engineer at Travelmob, began evaluating options for tackling both their fake listings and credit card fraud. Without a team dedicated to handling fraud, the responsibility for all types of fraud prevention was shouldered across multiple teams.
Travelmob began by manually reviewing new listings and booking requests, but it soon became clear that this approach just wouldn’t scale—plus, without a structured process, fraud was slipping through the cracks. Travelmob realized that building dedicated internal tools for fighting fraud would require time and resources that they couldn’t spare, and that anything they created internally couldn’t adequately address the complexity of fraud.