IPQualityScore Review – Protect Your ICO From Fraud

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The blockchain business is a bit like the Wild West – plenty of money to be made, but no shortage of danger if you’re not careful. That’s true for consumers and investors, but it’s also true for blockchain projects and ICO operators themselves. For example, scammers can use fake emails to exploit airdrop rules, or use bots and VPNs to game crypto exchanges. IPQualityScore (IPQS) offers a suite of anti-fraud and KYC tools that help crypto companies ensure their customers aren’t exploiting their systems.

Proxy Detection

One of the most important tools for any blockchain company is proxy detection – the ability to identify incoming users who are trying to obscure their actual IP or identity through the use of a proxy server, VPN server, or through a Tor onion connection.

These kinds of connections can be highly problematic for blockchain and crypto companies. For example, since the ICO rules are different from country to country, many ICO operators must filter users effectively by location or risk being in violation of local regulations. But proxies and VPNs enable users from blacklisted countries to masquerade as users in whitelisted countries, sneaking into ICOs they’re not legally allowed to participate in.

And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to proxies, which are also commonly used for everything from credit card fraud and chargebacks to advertising click fraud to abusive comments and spam.

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IPQS provides effective proxy detection and filtering so that ICO operators and crypto companies can filter these problematic users out of the pool before they have a chance to cause any trouble. To identify problematic users, IPQS looks at 19 unique variables for each incoming connection, including things like proxy status, organization, time zone, fraud score, VPN status, Tor status, crawler status, and more.

Identified threats are blacklisted, with the blacklisted being updated hourly to ensure that bad connections get blocked and temporarily hijacked connections get removed from the blacklist once the attack is resolved and they’re safe again. This helps ensure that while IPQS blocks bad actors, it’s not also blocking a lot of legitimate users who happen to have an IP that was associated with a scammer in the past.

IPQS’s fraud protection tools can be easily integrated into your existing system via an API, and the whitelist/blacklist rules and strictness are customizable so you can set up the filtering system that’s right for your project. There’s also good news for low-traffic projects: the first 5,000 API lookups each month are free.

Email Verification

Verifying emails is another important task for blockchain startups, especially those doing airdrops or ICOs who want to ensure that tokens are distributed fairly, and send to a variety of genuine users rather than having them all go to a single scammer with an army of bots and fake email accounts.

IPQS’s email verification system can differentiate between legitimate emails and disposable accounts that are likely to be used for a signup and then never checked again. And unlike many other email verification providers, IPQS’s blacklists are updated in real time, so that as temporary email providers add domains to evade blocks, IPQS’s systems are right alongside them, adding those new domains to the blacklist to ensure that clients don’t get stuck with a bunch of useless, dead email addresses on their mailing lists.

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IPQS checks to see if emails have been used as honeypots or spamtraps, and it’s also capable of helping you find additional useful emails for contacts and companies you might want by extrapolating from emails you already have in your system. For example, it could clue you in to the fact that a person who registered with a [email protected] address may also have a gmail address with the same username.

Other Anti-Fraud Tools

IPQS offers a variety of anti-fraud tools that can help blockchain projects ensure they’re not being taken advantage of and keep their customers safe. Its device fingerprinting tool, for example, scans over 200 data points in a user’s online fingerprint to determine whether they’re manipulating their online signature – for example, trying to make it look like they’re connecting from a different device than the one they’re actually using.

Users who engage in this kind of manipulation are highly likely to be up to no good, and IPQS’s system allows you to identify and remove these users before they take advantage of you by simply dropping a Javascript tag into your service’s code. IPQS’s system can generate a real-time fraud score based on the user’s fingerprint, and you can customize the rules to make things as strict or as lenient as you need to manage your user base. It’s also capable of detecting duplicate accounts, making sure that users aren’t double-dipping when they’re not supposed to.

Easy implementation

Of course, the best fraud detection in the world doesn’t do you much good if it’s a pain to implement or requires constant upkeep. Thankfully, neither is an issue with IPQS. Its tools are available via well-documented APIs with code examples for easy implementation, and it protects your site in real time, automatically updating its filters to ensure you’re getting the best up-to-the-minute fraud protection.

If you ever do have an issue, it also offers seven-days-a-week support, and its powerful data export tools mean that you’ll always have well-organized records you can check to see who the system is filtering out and why.