Challenge
Scaling effectively while building customer trust
In the early days, fraudulent activity on Universe was infrequent enough that each listing and transaction could be reviewed manually. But as the volume of event listings, hosts, and users started increasing rapidly, so did the risks and potential impact of spam, scams, and other fraudulent activity to the community. Attacks were also getting trickier to address as spam was constantly changing form and becoming more creative—and eventually, a major client’s event was attacked.
It was a pivotal moment. They didn’t want customers to be hesitant to host major events for fear of attacks. And the fraud team wanted to stop playing catch up. If a fraudulent event was posted or a spambot started messaging thousands of users—possibly redirecting them off the platform or towards scammy transactions—the team would only find out about it once it was too late. And each attack meant multiple developers would have to drop what they were working on to address the issue in time.