One of the remarkable things I learned talking to Yaron Samid, co-founder and CEO of BillGuard, is the level of credit card fraud that’s publicly reported on the Web.
Currently in beta, BillGuard has a mission to catch both unwanted and unauthorized credit transactions—there’s a difference—based on crowdsourced input from its subscribers.
As with a lot of companies that rely on the crowd, BillGuard faced a cold start problem: with few signed up to review and mark questionable charges, there’s little data.
BillGuard cleverly solved it by mining Twitter, consumer complaint forums, and other sites. For kicks, search Twitter for “credit card fraud” and prepare to be surprised
And you know what, according to Samid, they achieved a 20% hit rate matching complaints against vendors culled online with credit transactions from their existing pool of subscribers.Continue reading
