Which of these describes you – you provide a company with your email address in order to get a coupon and then get bombarded with followup emails, or you provide a company with a fake email address to get the coupon and then you never have to hear from them again?
The former might be annoying to you. But the latter is really annoying to companies that end up handing out coupons to customers they’ll never see again. So a new service is promising to help them ensure your crafty ways aren’t rewarded with a coupon.
The technology firm AtData has announced “SafeToTrust,” a solution aimed at combating “promotional abuse and coupon fraud.”
Using “the most advanced identification and classification models in the industry,” AtData says SafeToTrust will “detect and block disposable or temporary email addresses that are frequently used to create fake accounts to take advantage of promotions.”
The rollout of the new service comes after AtData studied the recent rise of disposable email domains it says are often used for fraudulent purposes. In 2019, it identified more than 900,000 new ones. A year later, that number jumped to more than two million. And last year, it surpassed three million.
Part of the reason is that there’s a legitimate demand for them, and there’s nothing wrong with utilizing them. If you want to protect your privacy, or protect your inbox from being spammed, there are plenty of free email services you can use for a temporary address if you don’t plan on being in regular email communication with whoever you’re giving it to.
But “fraudsters have adopted them as a firm favorite” to take advantage of retailers, AtData says. “A vast majority of U.S. consumers have used coupons, so they do work. But ecommerce is encountering increasing levels of promotional fraud. This conflict highlights the urgent need for a robust solution to protect promotional strategies from abuse.”
“Fraud” seems a pretty strong word for doing something that’s not illegal, and arguably isn’t even unethical, just because retailers have decided they don’t like it. “Abuse” may be in the eye of the beholder as well.
Last year, the ecommerce fraud and risk intelligence company Riskified considered where to draw the line between savvy shopping and fraud. Return fraud is one thing. So is falsely claiming a shipped item was never received. And organized fraud, where a handful of individuals create thousands of fake accounts in order to take advantage of a “first-time customer” discount, is frowned upon as well.
But requesting a single coupon that a retailer is freely offering, even if you do it with a temporary email address you don’t plan on using again, is something Riskified called “friendly fraud.” Shoppers engaging in such “relatively benign acts” are sometimes “considered the cost of doing business to keep an overall good customer happy,” the company found.
So if retailers don’t like it, it’s up to retailers if they want to stop it. And that’s where AtData says its solution comes in.
“Coupons are a cornerstone of retail marketing, but the rise of digital scams to exploit online discounts through multiple email addresses, fake accounts, and other deceptive practices, costs U.S. businesses hundreds of millions of dollars,” AtData Vice President of Product Brian Burke said in a statement. “Our new SafeToTrust solution safeguards brands by identifying and eliminating toxic emails associated with coupon and promotional abuse.”
“Toxic emails” is a pretty strong phrase, too. Maybe if retailers didn’t send you so many marketing emails after you request a coupon or make a single purchase, there wouldn’t be such a demand for temporary email addresses.
As part of a survey conducted earlier this year, three-quarters of shoppers said their preferred method of receiving coupons is via email. They weren’t asked whether they prefer to use their “real” email. But the next time they do business with a retailer that opts for AtData’s solution – they may find they no longer have a choice.
Image source: AtData
