Fraud via an IP address is fairly common and something that you want to avoid at all costs. The fallout of which can end up with your valuable information being seized. This includes both your location and identity online. It can leave you vulnerable.

Whilst there are plenty of preventative measures and systems in place to protect you from scammers and fraudsters online, it can still occur. It’s a good idea to know how to prevent IP fraud from happening and one way to do that is by knowing your IP fraud score.

What is an IP fraud score and why is it useful to know it? In this article, you’ll understand more about this type of fraud and how it can be prevented. Criminals can use your IP to launch cyberattacks and scams to you or others who may use this IP address. 

Understanding this area of online fraud can help you reduce the chances of becoming a victim yourself.

What is IP fraud?

An IP address is a unique identification number that refers to the device you’re using to access the internet. When it comes to IP fraud, fraudsters and scammers will use this as a channel to attack those users who are using a particular internet protocol address.

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Otherwise known as FoIP, it’s a threat for anyone with access to the internet. Whether it’s a big corporate business to the everyday individual.

Statistics on fraud online in 2022

Online fraud is on the rise and it’s at its most worrying as of 2022. With many businesses and individuals working from home, it’s meant more online users have been operating from vulnerable IP addresses and networks.

During the height of the pandemic, fraud and computer misuse offenses rose by 43% in the year ending June 2021. It shows the stark reality of how many crimes have made their way over to the digital world, especially with very few opportunities to police the online domain.

The cost of fraud has become astounding with identify theft cases costing $712.4 billion in 2020. For some, the impact of fraud can be damaging to the point where a lot of financial wealth is lost but also reputation, particularly for businesses.

What is an IP fraud score?

An IP fraud score can be used in order to minimize anything bad from entering your site. The points that make up your IP fraud score are things like a VPN for instance, which many are using to help protect their identity when browsing online.

The reputation of an IP address can also influence the score you have, especially if there have been any historically connected fraudsters or bots that have connected to this address.

For a business, it proves useful to know this score in order to help prevent any malicious behavior from occuring on the site. From the registration point to buying a product or service, it’s important to keep your website secure

Five key things you should know about IP fraud scores

Whether you’re aware of IP fraud scores or not, it’s worthwhile making use of this technology to help figure out if you need to improve your own or not. Here are five key things worth knowing about these scores.

1. Offers a great baseline for fraud intelligence 

By checking your IP fraud score, it’s a great starting point when it comes to fraud intelligence. It can help identify basic security measures that might need to be put in place or areas of concern when it comes to the safety of your website and the IP address or addresses that you use for business.

A baseline like this can often be a preventative measure that can spot the dangers of hackers and scammers before anything goes seriously wrong. 

2. It can influence email success rate

As a business, email marketing is a useful strategy to have within your marketing methods but a bad IP fraud score could hinder those efforts you make via email. Depending on how good or how bad your IP fraud score is will depend on whether or not it gets past the spam filters. 

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Improving your IP fraud score is going to help better your success rate when it comes to email marketing. It ensures the efforts of your marketing team are not going to waste.

3. There are some great tools for improving your IP score

There are some great tools in place to help improve your IP score. SEON’s full end-to-end fraud detection tool is useful in spotting potential dangers before they get out of hand.

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A detection tool like this one can help catch any suspicious connection changes that may occur on your site, as well as potential bot attacks. 

4. You can hide your IP address for additional protection

As a result of IP fraud and other various attacks via the internet, users are actively looking at new solutions to help hide their browsing online. A lot of individuals are finding the benefit of hiding their IP address. There are a number of ways that you can do this and which can further improve your IP fraud score as a result.

VPNs – VPNs are short for Virtual Private Networks. These are popular tools that will help tunnel all of the traffic from a device towards a server elsewhere. It means your address is protected from any fraudsters who may be trying to target your specific IP. 

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There are different VPNs that offer different types of IP addresses, so it’s worth exploring this service further.

Proxy Servers – Consider them as the middle ground between the device and a site. Both VPNs and TOR are considered proxies.

TOR – This is a system that helps with anonymity by masking IP addresses. Much like a VPN, it protects the user’s IP address but this one usually requires software to be downloaded which provides a free browser for encrypting and passing traffic in order to conceal the IP address.

5. IP addresses contain a lot of information

There is a lot of information that can come from an IP address and which can be useful for fraudsters in attacking. Knowing what IP addresses can tell you about a user and whether that user is suspicious enough to warrant concern.

• Internet Service Provider – With an IP address, you can find out if the ISP itself is a residential one, a public one, or a web server/data center. 
• Geolocation – A legitimate IP address can reveal where the user is in the world, which is why many users choose to hide IP so that they can evade those snooping in on them.

Open port and spam checklist scans are two useful scans that can be performed to measure risk and fraudulence. 

For open port scans, they measure the risk of the user such as hackled SSH connections that could be dangerous. A spam checklist can be good for cataloging IP addresses that have been used for email spamming. As such, if they show up in the scan, you can assume they’re fraudulent users

Other ways to help protect your business from fraud

In general, looking after your business and personal digital footprint is important. There are many methods you can implement to help protect your business from fraud.

Protect all accounts with the best security 

All of your accounts, whether they be banking and credit cards to your online logins across a variety of platforms, should be protected. There are lots of threats to your online profiles that you want to protect as best as you can.

A good way to do this is to introduce stronger passwords that are unique from one account to the next. You’ll also find it useful to put in two-factor authentication for that extra layer of security.

Educate your employees on staying safe online

Your employees are responsible for keeping your business safe just as much as your own active efforts. It’s good to educate your employees on staying safe online. Even the most experienced online users will fall for scams and hackers.

Regular employee training can help give you ensure your employees have the best knowledge when it comes to spotting potential risks or dangers online.

Stay up to date with the latest fraud methods

Whilst training is useful, you also want to keep your ear to the digital ground when it comes to the latest methods and attacks that fraudsters and cybercriminals are using in today’s world. Being clued up on what to look out for is going to help prevent a lot of threats from occurring.

Insure your business

Finally, make sure you insure your business. There are a lot of insurance options to protect your business online and with the growing threats when it comes to online crime, it’s worth having.

Assessing IP fraud scores is a good way of helping spot the dangerous users on your site and to eradicate the problem before it gets any worse. When it comes to your site’s safety, it’s worth looking at regularly.