Rich Kahn with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Unmasking Ad Fraud

Rich Kahn talks with Jason Barnard about unmasking ad fraud.

Rich Kahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Anura.io, talks with Jason Barnard about the massive impact of ad fraud and how invalid traffic (IVT) continues to plague the digital advertising ecosystem. They discuss the different layers of fraud, including general invalid traffic (GIVT) and more subtle forms like SIVT, which mimics legitimate user behavior.

Rich explains how traditional detection methods often miss the mark, especially when fraud occurs at the top of the funnel. He emphasizes the importance of early-stage detection to avoid the costly consequences of fraud, which can quickly escalate once the money is already spent.

The conversation concludes with insights on how brands and platforms can take proactive steps to fight fraud — using smarter data analysis, pre-bid detection, and validation tools. Rich Kahn and Jason Barnard stress the need for a more transparent, data-driven approach to ad fraud prevention, ensuring that the future of digital advertising is more secure and reliable for businesses and consumers.

What you’ll learn from Rich Kahn

00:00 Rich Kahn and Jason Barnard
01:57 What Did Jason Barnard Emphasize on the Brand SERP of Rich Kahn?
02:28 Why is Google not presenting Rich Kahn as the Primary Result for His Name According to Jason Barnard?
03:45 What is the Difference Between How Google and AI Assess Your Authority or Fame?
04:26 What is the Total Global Ad Spend per Year?
04:35 How Do People Misunderstand the Scale of Money Being Spent in Certain Industries?
04:54 How Much is Ad Fraud Predicted to Reach by 2028?
05:19 What Types of Platforms Are Included in the $140 Billion Ad Fraud Estimate?
06:09 What Are the Forms of Stealing Involved in Ad Fraud?
06:46 Why Does Ad Fraud Affect Advertisers Even if Traffic Buyers Aren’t Committing it Intentionally?
08:28 What Types of Fraud Exist in Traffic Bought From Platforms Like Google and Facebook?
08:34 Why Does Ad Fraud Still Happen Even When Affiliates Are Only Paid for Actual Sales?
08:48 What Methods Do Fraudsters Use to Fake Transactions and Get Paid as Affiliates?
09:12 Why Do Fraudulent Affiliates Get Away With Scams Before Being Caught?
09:49 How Does Fraudulent Traffic Occur on Platforms Like Google?
10:46 How Do Affiliates Use Google AdSense to Commit Ad Fraud?
11:09 Where Are Search Ads Often Placed to Trick Users Into Clicking Them?
11:31 How Does Fraudulent Traffic Occur on Platforms Like Facebook?
11:39 What Impact Do Fake Facebook Profiles Have On Ad and Engagement Fraud?
12:09 What Does Fraud Mean When It Involves Making Money From Online Traffic?
12:39 Why is it Important to Spot Ad Fraud Early?
13:08 Why is Fraud Much Higher in Programmatic Advertising Compared to Google Search?
13:47 Why is the Fraud Rate So High in Connected TV Ads?
14:23 What is IVT?
14:37 What is GIVT?
14:45 What is SIVT?
15:01 How Can GIVT Be Determined?
15:10 What is Required to Identify SIVT?
16:02 How Can You Spot Ad Fraud Early and Minimize Losses?
16:19 How Can Fraudsters Fake Lead Submissions and Avoid Detection?
17:06 What is the Risk of Violating the TCPA With Fraudulent Lead Generation?
17:48 Why is it Important to Ask if the Person Remembers Filling Out the Form When Calling Leads?
18:18 How Can Businesses Protect Themselves From Fraudulent Traffic Both Immediately and in the Long Term?
18:57 Why Can Some Fraud Detection Solutions Succeed When Tools Like Google CAPTCHA Still Struggle?
21:09 What Challenge is Faced When Balancing Fraud Prevention and Avoiding False Positives in Ads?
21:33 What Does it Mean When 15% of Flagged Fraudulent Traffic is Actually a False Positive?
23:15 Who is Likely to Win the Battle Between AI-Powered Fraud and AI-Driven Fraud Detection?

This episode was recorded live on video May 20th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e465-ensuring-your-web-content-is-seen-by-real-people/id1190420698?i=1000681851003
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ad-fraud-detection-and-prevention-with-rich-kahn/id1485152587?i=1000682226941
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/battling-digital-marketing-fraud-with-rich-kahn/id1611588646?i=1000682868054
Anura.io
Rich Kahn

Transcript from Rich Kahn with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Unmasking Ad Fraud

[00:00:00] Rich Kahn: So we’re talking about programmatic, which is the number one channel for Digital Marketing. So display ads, TV ads, things like that. We’re talking search and social so all the search companies like Google, Yahoo, Bing. We’re talking about all this, all the social channels, Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitter.

[00:00:22] Rich Kahn: We even talking about the native brands like Tabula and our brain. So any digital affiliate marketing, all those channels combined. The global spend, from what I can gather, based on doing some research with $639 billion was spent last year. And of that, based on our data that we catch we’re seeing that at about $140 billion is stolen every year.

[00:00:45] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:48] Narrator: Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands at test of time and become their legacy?

[00:01:08] Narrator: A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:01:14] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. It’s me, Jason Barnard, and a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Rich Kahn.

[00:01:27] Rich Kahn: That’s an interesting introduction. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me today.

[00:01:31] Jason Barnard: It’s an absolute pleasure. Today we’re going to be unmasking ad fraud and it’s a billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, a hundred billion dollar problem. Is that correct?

[00:01:43] Rich Kahn: As of last year, it was $140 billion problem.

[00:01:46] Jason Barnard: Right. Huge, problem. So we’re gonna be digging into why it’s happening, where it’s happening, and potentially what you can do about it, how it’s getting worse, how you can protect yourself.

[00:01:57] Jason Barnard: But before all that, we’re going to quickly look at your Brand SERP. It’s always my favorite thing to do right at the start of the show. When I search your name, this is what I see. You’re up there with a few other people with the same name. And I was disappointed that when I search in online, I don’t see that. looks much, much better.

[00:02:15] Jason Barnard: That’s your Knowledge Panel, and it’s actually quite a good Knowledge Panel with those lovely images at the top, the blue cards, the description on the right hand side, Google’s factual understanding about you. And for the audience, this is what we do. We take people from this situation where Google isn’t presenting them primarily, it’s presenting lots of other people.

[00:02:35] Jason Barnard: You don’t look so good and here you are like a superstar.

[00:02:39] Jason Barnard: And in fact, I can tell you the reason that it’s not doing, that it isn’t confident enough that you are famous enough. Do you feel it’s wrong?

[00:02:48] Rich Kahn: It’s funny, a little story. I’m a storyteller. I like to tell stories. I saw a gentleman, and I’m drawing a blank on his name right now, but he’s a guy who sees spirits from the other world. And we’re in an audience in Atlantic City of about a thousand of us in the audience. And he comes over in my direction. He is saying he is looking for somebody famous. I don’t consider myself famous, at all. And he’s consisting and pushing and pushing. And then he says, look, if you walked into and then this is where he got specific.

[00:03:22] Rich Kahn: He said, if you walked into a trade show, would people know who you are? And I’m like, oh, that’s me. I go to trade shows for the last 20 plus years. I walk into a trade show, everybody knows who I am. And he goes, well, that’s famous. I go, well, I don’t consider that famous. I mean, I’m well known in my industry, but outside of my industry, not as much.

[00:03:41] Rich Kahn: So it was kind of, so do I consider myself famous now?

[00:03:44] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. Well, and that is an interesting point. When somebody’s searching on Google, you need to be considered by Google to be the most famous person with your name. Whereas with AI, with ChatGPT and so on and so forth, they have context.

[00:03:59] Jason Barnard: So being important within your industry, within your niche, when somebody’s having a conversation with ChatGPT is actually significantly easier to do because it can niche down, because it has more context when you’re talking. So onwards with ad fraud, $140 billion a year, and that’s a huge amount. How much is ad spend a year?

[00:04:26] Rich Kahn: Last year ad spend was 639 billion globally. So you’re talking about a 22% amount. The thing is people don’t understand. I like to watch Shark Tank a lot and people will talk about this new product and they’re going to disrupt the $10 billion industry, a $20 billion industry.

[00:04:46] Rich Kahn: So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of money being spent and people don’t recognize how much $140 billion is. So what’s interesting is we’re predicting by 2028, it’s going to to be over 200 billion, which is more money than Disney and Netflix combined. Just to put it in scale.

[00:05:06] Jason Barnard: Okay. So our number of 140 billion and ad fraud.

[00:05:11] Jason Barnard: What ad fraud does it actually cover? Because are we talking about Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn?

[00:05:19] Rich Kahn: Everything. So we’re talking about programmatic, which is the number one channel for Digital Marketing. So display ads, TV ads, things like that. We’re talking search and social. So all the search companies like Google, Yahoo, Bing.

[00:05:33] Rich Kahn: We’re talking about all this, all the social channels, Facebook, Instagram, X, Twitter. We’re even talking about, the native brands like Taboola and Outbrain. So any digital, affiliate marketing, all those channels combined. The global spend, from what I can gather based on doing some research, was $639 billion was spent last year. And of that, based on our data that we catch, we’re seeing that at about $140 billion of stolen every year.

[00:06:03] Jason Barnard: Right. So we’ve got 20% stolen. What are the forms of stealing?

[00:06:09] Rich Kahn: So it really comes down to using bots, malware, or human fraud forms to click on ads, view impressions. So affiliate marketing, let’s face it, affiliate marketing is paid to generate some type of action, whether it’s a click, fill in form, credit card transaction. They’re paid to do something. And once you start paying people to do something, the cheaters find a way to come out of the woodwork and cheat the system. So let’s say you pay an affiliate to drive visitors to your landing page, whatever that page is.

[00:06:46] Rich Kahn: So let’s look at a typical example. Let’s call it John. John is an affiliate and he gets paid to drive traffic to a site. He’s got a site that talks about, let’s use cars, for example, car insurance. It’s a weird one. We’ll just talk about car insurance.

[00:07:06] Rich Kahn: He’s got a whole blog site dedicated to car insurance and how to save money on car insurance and what insurances are important to have, which ones are a waste of money, and he does all this stuff. So he generates a lot of readership. He generates, let’s say, a million visitors a month coming to his site.

[00:07:20] Rich Kahn: People want to know. It’s a very hot topic in the industry. People always talk about it and save money on it. And he drives traffic to your site and he gets paid for all those clicks. And he is wow, for my million visitors I generated $10,000 in revenue or $20,000 in revenue this month.

[00:07:37] Rich Kahn: I wonder if I can go out and buy traffic to my site and drive that traffic over and make more money. So now he starts searching the internet and he finds some cheap traffic sites. He can buy another million visitors, really inexpensive. So let’s say he’s making $10,000 on his million visitors, right?

[00:07:58] Rich Kahn: He finds that he can buy another million visitors to his site for 5,000 bucks, and they’re still generating the same 10,000. So in his mind, hey, I’m spending five, making 10 or who wouldn’t wanna double their money every month? That’s the greatest investment of all time. But where he’s buying traffic is latent with fraud, and he has no idea.

[00:08:17] Rich Kahn: So what ends up happening is the advertiser is now being exposed to fraud. Even though John is not trying to commit fraud, it’s just how he buys his traffic. And it’s not on purpose. Let’s face it. If you buy traffic from Google, there’s fraud in there. You buy traffic from Facebook, there’s fraud in there.

[00:08:34] Jason Barnard: That affiliate idea of saying, what I’m sending traffic, I get more money for more traffic, would be sold by saying, we only get paid if we sell something.

[00:08:45] Rich Kahn: Right. Advanced frauds just know that, right? So in order to get paid, they know that every so many visitors have to have some type of transaction.

[00:08:54] Rich Kahn: It could be filling out a form to save money on their car insurance, like a lead generation play. It could be here putting a credit card in the system to buy a product off of Amazon, and they use stolen credit cards to do this, right? Because affiliates, they generally want to get paid fast. So the average affiliate payout is 15 days.

[00:09:15] Rich Kahn: The average response for a credit card chargeback is months. So I can be an affiliate, generate a lot of these false transactions, get paid my affiliate commission within 15 days, and know I can stick around for a while before you catch on that I’m a fraudulent visitor or a fraudulent affiliate and then try to charge me back.

[00:09:36] Rich Kahn: And I’m already gone. I created a new affiliate ID and I’m starting the whole process all over again.

[00:09:40] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. Okay. And what about the fraudulent traffic on Google or Facebook? How does that work?

[00:09:47] Rich Kahn: Okay. Two very different ways. Right? So let’s start with Google and we’ll go into facebook. So Google. Google only gets about, when you go to Google and you buy traffic from Google? We’re talking about Google search right now because Yeah, they have a lot of different products. We’re just talking about Google search that everybody’s familiar with. So 10% of the traffic that you buy from Google comes from google.com.

[00:10:09] Rich Kahn: The other 90% comes from technically affiliates or what they’ll call publishers. But you’re familiar with CNN and weather.com? That all makes sense. But there’s thousands and tens of thousands of websites out there that have small blog sites. And Google puts Google AdSense on those sites because they’re valuable traffic.

[00:10:28] Rich Kahn: And those people tend to go out and buy cheap traffic to try to make more money off the traffic. And therein lies some fraud. So on Google search directly will typically see five to 10% fraud because they have that model. Now let’s look at Facebook. Facebook doesn’t buy traffic.

[00:10:46] Jason Barnard: From that perspective, it’s actually with AdSense on people’s websites. It’s quite similar to the affiliate story you told early on. But from the Search itself, that’s a much smaller problem.

[00:10:59] Rich Kahn: It’s still five to 10% because even though Google AdSense should choose those words, there are affiliates that have access to Google search listings.

[00:11:09] Rich Kahn: Where, you’ll see like an article and then you’ll see some search links embedded inside of the article and then you’ll see some more content and that’s how they wrap their content and they get paid on those clicks. Anytime somebody clicks on one of those ads, that site gets paid. And of course if they get paid to do something, they find a way to cheat.

[00:11:28] Jason Barnard: Okay. Anyhow, onto Facebook, which I know nothing about.

[00:11:31] Rich Kahn: Okay, so Facebook doesn’t have an affiliate network, doesn’t have a publisher. Everything they generate is user generated. It’s just organic traffic coming to the site. So the first question I’ll always ask my audience is, do you believe Facebook has fake profiles?

[00:11:47] Rich Kahn: And we all say, yes. We all know this. They talk about it. They’re in the process of trying to shut them down. Why?

[00:11:55] Rich Kahn: Ever go to Fiverr and find that you can buy 10,000 likes for your website for like a hundred bucks?

[00:12:00] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Okay.

[00:12:02] Rich Kahn: Where does that come from? So what happens is the fraud takes place and makes money off of Facebook indirectly.

[00:12:09] Rich Kahn: So my definition of fraud talks about the reason for fraud is somebody’s making money either directly or indirectly on that traffic. And so if Facebook isn’t going to be an indirect form of that.

[00:12:22] Jason Barnard: Okay. Right. So it’s all about traffic. We scared everybody. There’s lots of fraud. 20%. Depending on the platform.

[00:12:27] Jason Barnard: Google’s only 10%. So Google is relatively nice. Let’s say. What can we do to spot this early? Because obviously you can’t prevent it. What you can do is spot it early. Because you were saying screwed every month. Ah! You can’t prevent it.

[00:12:40] Rich Kahn: but let’s talk about spotting it first. Okay. So I always tell people now it’s not a question that if you have fraud because everyone’s always wondering, do I have fraud? It’s a question of how much we all have it. I have been tested, I have personally tested over a thousand companies websites and found fraud in every one of them. Some have small amounts because they’re doing a lot of proactive steps to try to minimize the fraud, and some have significantly higher amounts.

[00:13:08] Rich Kahn: So look, we talk about Google, right? So Google’s got five to 10% fraud on their search product, right? But programmatic is one of the largest channels of marketing. So banners and TV ads and that averages 50% fraud.

[00:13:20] Jason Barnard: Wow.

[00:13:21] Rich Kahn: 50% fraud. And I can go into a whole talk about why, but it just, it’s 50% fraud.

[00:13:29] Jason Barnard: My team mentioned the TV fraud, which I was surprised to see in this conversation.

[00:13:34] Jason Barnard: Connected TV ad fraud is surging. 172 billion by 2028 is what Gab tells me.

[00:13:42] Jason Barnard: Why is that so high?

[00:13:44] Rich Kahn: Alright, let’s look at it. To understand that, you have to understand fraud itself, right? So are you familiar with the IAB the Internet Advertising Bureau?

[00:13:55] Jason Barnard: Yeah.

[00:13:55] Rich Kahn: Okay.

[00:13:57] Rich Kahn: You got the four A’s and you got the ANA. They got together about 12 years ago and they built a industry standard for fraud detection companies because fraud detection companies started coming out around 2008, 2009, and they started growing. So they said, we’re going to put some standards around this because I can see this getting out of control.

[00:14:15] Rich Kahn: It’s a SaaS-based product. SaaS is sexy when it comes to making money because it has a low cost of goods sold compared to what they charge, so it has all the advantages. So they decided, okay, we’re going to classify this. We’re going to call it IVT, invalid traffic. Most people are familiar with that term IVT, but what they’re not familiar with is how IVT is classified in their process.

[00:14:37] Rich Kahn: What they did was they classified GIVT for general invalid traffic. It’s your basic data center attacks, some known bots, things like that. Then you got your SIVT, which is sophisticated invalid traffic, your advanced bots like AI bots, malware, human fraud farms that can skirt detection, things like that.

[00:14:56] Rich Kahn: So the reason connected tv, oh, okay. So I’m going to go back one more second. So GIVT can be done through an API call. You pass the IP address user agent, and then you can determine whether that’s fraud or not. On two data points, SIVT requires a more sophisticated approach. our SIVT product is, collecting over 800 data points on the person and is able to make a decision based on that and find the most sophisticated levels of fraud.

[00:15:23] Rich Kahn: So now that we know the two different kinds, CTV, connected TV only allows an API call. So it can only determine based on GIVT analysis. So frauds just know this, right? They know, Hey, I got to bounce off of different ips. I can’t use data centers. I got to do things a little bit more sophisticated.

[00:15:43] Rich Kahn: They produce sophisticated levels of fraud that cannot be detected in the CTV environment, and therefore, just like programmatic, it has a problem with sophisticated invalid traffic and that’s why it’s growing so fast.

[00:15:56] Jason Barnard: Okay. That was super interesting. Now we’re back to how do we spot it early, and then how do we prevent it?

[00:16:02] Rich Kahn: Okay, so to spot traffic, it follows the numbers, right? So if you’re selling stuff, look at the chargebacks, right? Is my chargebacks increasing? Because affiliates are going to use fake credit cards. If you’re a lead generator or you’re a brand that’s generating a lead for, let’s say you’re Geico and you’re, hey, somebody comes to your site, fills out a form, they want to save money on their car insurance.

[00:16:27] Rich Kahn: When you call that person, do they remember filling out your form?

[00:16:33] Rich Kahn: Are they easy to get on the phone? Because it’s very easy for me to steal Jason’s information. Go into a form as an affiliate use. Pay a human fraud form to do it so they don’t get, they don’t get caught by bot detection. Type in your name, phone number, email address, hit submit.

[00:16:50] Rich Kahn: They do a data check to say, yep, I got Jason down. This is definitely his email. Definitely his phone number. Then they call you within mid, usually within seconds of the form being filled out and you’re like, I don’t remember filling out a form. You just filled it out two seconds ago. No, that wasn’t me.

[00:17:05] Rich Kahn: That’s a level of fraud. Now what the problem with that is the brand that made that phone call just broke TCPA compliance and is now can be sued for TCPA violations, which is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. So now they can be sued for stuff Class A. And now let’s say you’re a big brand, like we just, we were using Geico, right?

[00:17:25] Rich Kahn: So let’s say Geico makes a million phone calls a month. A lawyer gets one person complaining. Guess what they’re gonna do? Subpoena the records. Look at other call disposition reports that say that they didn’t fill out the form, and now build a class action lawsuit. Speaking of which, it’s the fastest growing, lawsuits in this country, a T-C-P-A violation, class action lawsuits.

[00:17:44] Jason Barnard: Wow.

[00:17:45] Rich Kahn: So that’s a problem that they’re going to run into, right?

[00:17:48] Jason Barnard: You need to create the data point. So when you’re calling people, you need that question. Do you remember filling in the form? And that helped you to actually identify and you can immediately say, actually we’re getting a lot more of these and we need to stop, or we need to look at our advertising.

[00:18:02] Jason Barnard: And then for the chargebacks, how you’ve got that timeline, you were saying there’s a timeline of several months.

[00:18:07] Rich Kahn: Yeah. So this is how, after the fact, you can determine that there’s been a problem. In order to determine things beforehand, at this day and age, you need a solution upfront.

[00:18:18] Rich Kahn: So like a solution, like what we do, for our clients is we basically put our code there as soon as the person lands on the landing page within a second, we know if it’s real or fake. Before they fill out a form, before they process a credit card, so that we can allow our clients to stop that transaction as in its steps and prevent, mitigate buying that type of traffic in the future.

[00:18:41] Rich Kahn: It’s a two step approach. One, protect immediately, and then also protect your budget as you move forward.

[00:18:46] Jason Barnard: And identify where the traffic is coming from so that you can immediately say, this is the dirty one. And so why are you able to do it when Google’s capture, for example, still struggles?

[00:18:57] Rich Kahn: Think about it. Okay. A capture is filling out a puzzle. . Human fraud forms are involved all the time. They can fill out those puzzles too.

[00:19:05] Rich Kahn: AI has gotten to a point. They get past all captures. Captures don’t work anymore. People still use them. They just don’t work.

[00:19:15] Jason Barnard: Okay. The question, whether it’s capture or another technology, why is it that you can detect somebody or that it isn’t a person or it’s a fraudulent visit within you said two seconds, right?

[00:19:28] Jason Barnard: Where massive companies like Google struggle.

[00:19:34] Rich Kahn: I actually spoke at a trade show three or four weeks ago. I actually met with the Head of Fraud for Google because they wanted to find out why we’re catching stuff that they’re missing.

[00:19:44] Rich Kahn: They’ve got a thousand people on their team. This is what they do.

[00:19:49] Rich Kahn: And he goes, it’s just that certain team environments. There are certain things that we miss. You look at data differently than what we look at data. They have access to data. They have access to a huge amount of data. They only have access to Google data. I have access to the world. I have data they don’t have access to because I see traffic coming from X, I see traffic coming from LinkedIn, I see traffic from programmatic, like they don’t have access to that data. And we’ve been doing fraud detection longer, I think, than any other company in the marketplace. We started the project in 2005.

[00:20:24] Rich Kahn: So we’ve been building and tracking trillions of visitors looking at data.

[00:20:27] Rich Kahn: And our stuff is based on performance feedback from clients. So when a client comes back and says, Hey, I think you mismarked this person, this real person, this fraud, and here’s why. We’ll go back and fix the prop, fix the issue. Why did we do that? Because we stand on our no false positive guarantee.

[00:20:46] Rich Kahn: We have a no false positive guarantee. So the last thing I want is Jason coming to my site, trying to buy a product and you can’t because I miss marking as fraud. Because then it really cost a client a lot of money. And unfortunately, based on client feedback, the average fraud protection solution in the marketplace has an average of 15% false positives.

[00:21:08] Jason Barnard: Okay. Yeah. And that was actually going to be my question, when you get a false positive and you stop them. But you are saying there’s a 20% loss, but on the one side of fraud. A 15% false positive on the other. So within the industry, generally speaking, forgetting your solution, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.

[00:21:31] Rich Kahn: yes and no. So the percentages aren’t the same, right? When I’m saying there’s 20% plus fraud in the industry, right? We’re looking at 15% false postives. That means the company marked 20% of your traffic is fraudulent, 15% of that would have been mismarked. So it ends up being like a three or 4% issue. Still a problem because I’ll give a perfect example. We have a content writer on our team. And she was buying some fashion stuff from a woman’s fashion site. She’s always shopped before they’ve upgraded their website. She put a bunch, put a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff in her basket, went to purchase and won’t let her purchase it.

[00:22:13] Rich Kahn: So she’s ah, I know this, they must have upgraded their fraud protection to some company I am going to, I know how it works. I’m going to switch browsers. What browsers didn’t have an issue. Then she switched devices. She went to her tablet or her cell phone, did the same thing, still couldn’t make the purchase.

[00:22:29] Rich Kahn: So they must have blocked her IP address because some old school technologies think you can block by IP address and you guys should all know you can’t because I’m in an office right now. There’s 25 of us in the office and we all share the same IP address. Go to Starbucks, you all share the same IP address, you go to a cell tower, all say same IP address.

[00:22:48] Rich Kahn: So she went to the competitor, put the same items into the shopping cart and made the purchase. She said, from now on I’m going to buy from the competitor because I don’t have a problem. That false positive just cost them a co-hire that spends good money.

[00:23:03] Jason Barnard: So one last question then is with AI and AI is going to make fraud even more prevalent, but also fraud detection.

[00:23:11] Jason Barnard: Potentially much, much better. Who’s going to win?

[00:23:15] Rich Kahn: It’s a cat-mouse game, right? Because at the end of the day, AI is a tool available to both the fraudster and the good guys, right? So the fraudsters have been using it. In fact, they made it easy. So let’s say you’re not really much of a developer, but you’re a little technical savvy, right?

[00:23:32] Rich Kahn: Like most people are these days because we all know how to use a computer and we can follow direction, we can follow YouTube video. You can go to the dark web and download a product called Fraud GPT. It will actually write the bots for you.

[00:23:44] Rich Kahn: You can tell it what type of attack you’re looking to make, how you want to make it, and it’ll spit out the code and then you can say, how do I implement this?

[00:23:51] Rich Kahn: It’ll actually walk you step by step through how to implement that type of bot. So they have a whole slew of people who maybe didn’t have the technical skill now do to commit fraud. But at the same token, we, the good guys have access to AI to help us continue to find more fraud.

[00:24:09] Rich Kahn: And it’s the constant cat and mouse game. The biggest thing for us, and I think most of my competitors do the same, is catching when a new level of fraud takes place. Having that fraud bound before it becomes a big, wide scale problem. So usually we are rolling out updates twice a week. Once or twice a week of new levels of fraud that we caught.

[00:24:31] Rich Kahn: And usually the impact on the network is like 0.0001%. Like it’s just starting. It’s not a big problem. Nobody’s complaining about it, but we catch it in time so we can solve it before it becomes, oh my God, I just noticed that 20% of my traffic looks weird and you’re not catching it. So we were able to do that kind of stuff.

[00:24:50] Rich Kahn: Brilliant, wonderful. So we don’t know who win, but you are certainly on the ball and when you were saying we update twice a week, I think from a customer perspective we don’t realize that things are moving quite that fast. And with spyware malware must be the same kind of story maybe more often. And certainly with Google in the SEO world, people in the SEO world focus on the big updates and they forget that Google are updating their algorithms hundreds of times a day until Microsoft back onto it. My terrain there. Thank you very much, Rich. That was absolutely delightful. Thank you everyone for watching you get the outro song, which is exactly the same as the intro song.

[00:25:30] Rich Kahn: A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Rich.

[00:25:36] Jason Barnard: Appreciate it. Jason. Thanks for having me today.

[00:25:38] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.