Amazon’s Machine Learning Tech Helps Retailers Tackle Fraud
Emergent Insight:
Small online retail businesses are in the thick of the competition to survive these days. Besides a global pandemic, they face constant perpetrators of retail fraud. How to stop them? Artificial intelligence. Jia Jen Low posts at TechHQ about a new solution from Amazon for retailers that allows them to battle retail fraud enemies with machine learning. Although it does involve the retailer sharing customer data with the tech giant, it can save them money, product and time by identifying the bad actors. As retail fraud becomes more complex all sorts of businesses will need the power of AI to help fight the battles.
Original Article:
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Fraud is a multi-billion-dollar problem for today’s retailers, but AWS machine learning can help weed out the problem.
- Online fraud is a billion-dollar problem in the e-commerce sector
- Amazon has long used machine learning technology to weed out fraud, and now is enabling customers to access the tech
As e-commerce continues to ramp up, so too does fraud. Each year, tens of billions of dollars are lost this way – and every time a solution is found, cybercriminals are just as quick to find ways to circumvent them.
Even in 2020, countless techniques are successfully in operation. From ‘friendly fraud’, where customers claim the goods were purchased by a stolen card or don’t live up to expectations, to identity theft, when a fraudster obtains and uses another person’s identifying personal information to make a purchase – there are many doors open for bad actors to leave retailers out of pocket.
Amazon’s path to success and continued dominance might frequently attract justified scrutiny, but it’s difficult to understate the impact the platform and its technology has had on smaller retailers, and innovation in the retail sector in general. In fact, 90% of smaller retailers see Amazon as a “business enabler,” according to an IDC survey. Another part of that success is down to its own significant investments in cracking down on online fraud over the last 20 years. Now the company is making that tech available to customers.
Launched by AWS, Amazon Fraud Detector automates the time consuming and expensive steps to build, train, and deploy a machine learning model for fraud detection, making it easier for customers to leverage the technology.
It customizes each model it creates to a customer’s own dataset, making it more accurate than current one-size-fits-all solutions.