Sign Up Protection
Overview
Not every user who tries to create an account on your site has good intentions. Some are malicious actors attempting to create multiple accounts—whether for account aging and laying the groundwork for future fraud attacks or for abusing new account related discounts. Stopping abuse and fraud at the entry point protects your account ecosystem in multiple ways. It helps prevent losses from users exploiting promotions, ensures compliance with your terms and conditions, and allows you to measure meaningful customer metrics accurately—giving you greater control over your ecosystem.
The Signup API helps prevent fraudulent account creation by providing approve/decline decisions in real time when a user attempts to register. Implementing the Signup API is seamless, as outlined in the process below.
Primary Use Cases
There are a number of ways you can utilize the account sign up protection offered by this API. The Account Sign Up API can be used to enforce the following scenarios:
- Multiple Account Abuse: To prevent the user from creating an account if they’ve already created [X number] of accounts using alternate identifiers (email, phone).
- Promotional/Incentive/Bonus Abuse: To prevent the user from creating an account if they’ve already used a referral code [X number] times with any other credentials.
- Referral Abuse: To prevent the user from creating an account using a referral code if they’ve already used a referral code [X number] times with any other credentials.
- Fake Accounts: To prevent the user from creating an account if any of their known aliases have been previously blocked due to fraud in the Forter ecosystem.
- Seller-side Abuse: To prevent sellers from creating an account if any of their known aliases have been previously blocked due to fraud, abuse, or another policy violation.
- T&C Abuse: To prevent the user from creating an account if any of their known aliases have been previously blocked due to policy violation. An example may be: To prevent the user from creating an account if they are flagged by merchant as a known abuser.
- Bot Protection: To prevent Bots from generating accounts on your platform
Integration Steps
In your dedicated Forter portal, you will receive a JavaScript snippet for both sandbox and production. For native mobile apps, you will receive links to download Forter's Native SDKs. You'll paste the JS script on the appropriate pages of your website or call mobile SDK methods on relevant mobile app screens so that it can load and asynchronously collect important behavioral data from your customer. The script or mobileUID generated by the mobile SDK will also generate a unique token for each user on your site that should be included in the Account Sign Up API Request Body.
Send signup request for decision
The Signup API is used for approving / declining account creation attempts by customers or end users.
Signup API Request
Data points collected are common signup properties:
- Account ID and additional characteristics (e.g. type of account)
- eventTime- The time that the trigger event occurred in MILLISECONDS
- connectionInformation - Cyber intelligence data to analyze browsing behavior, device and connection quality such as IP address, user agent and data collected via JS / mobile SDK
- User Personal Details-User personal Details Such as: email or additional info collected (phone, names, etc..
- Nice-to-have signup flow indicators (Social SSO used, "remember this device")
{
"accountId": "e520-ba9a-367-60b",
"eventTime": 1415287568000,
"connectionInformation": {
"customerIP": "10.0.0.127",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.73 Safari/537.36",
"forterTokenCookie": "2315688945984"
},
"channelType": "WEB",
"accountData": {
"personalDetails": {
"firstName": "John",
"lastName": "Smith",
"email": "[email protected]"
},
"created": 1415273168,
"type": "BUSINESS",
"merchantAccountStatus": "open",
"status": "ACTIVE",
}
}Signup API Response
The response body will include the accountId, correlationId, a decision, as well as parameters for the verification method and a recommendation for further identification if needed (i.e. MFA or supplementary identification documents). Upon receipt of the response, you can leverage the forterDecision and recommendation parameters in the response body to curate the customer journey or block bad actors from creating bogus accounts on your site.
Key Fields:
- forterDecision: The latest Forter decision regarding the attempted action. Said fields may hold one of various options:
- "APPROVE" for approved signup requests, where user should be allowed to register for a new accounts;
- "DECLINE" for declined signup requests, where user should be declined from registering for new accounts;
- "VERIFICATION_REQUIRED" for signup requests, where user should be triggered an additional verification (via email, sms, etc.,;
- "NOT_REVIEWED".
- recommendation: A specific recommendation for an action that might help the customer to complete their transaction/action (e.g. verify phone via SMS, verify via push notification, verify email, perform a 3DS check, etc.)
- correlationId: A Forter unique identifier that should be sent to Forter as part of the AdvancedAuthenticationMethod object to correlate the MFA recommendation given in this response with the relevant additional authentication attempt result.
{
"forterDecision": "VERIFICATION_REQUIRED",
"recommendation": "EMAIL_VERIFICATION",
"accountId": "e520-ba9a-367-60b",
"correlationId": "HGJ7512345H3DE",
"verificationMethod": {
"correlationId": "HGJ7512345H3DE",
}
}{
"forterDecision": "APPROVE",
"recommendation": "",
"accountId": "e520-ba9a-367-60b",
"correlationId": "HGJ7512345H3DE",
"verificationMethod": {
}
}Send authentication attempts
The Authentication result API is used to Inform Forter of authentication results after an MFA was required by a previous Signup API request, using the provided correlation ID. While no decision is provided on this request, it is required in order to ensure optimal customer experience as well as continuously improving the decision model.
Authentication result API Request
Key Fields:
- accountId: Customer's account UID in merchant's site
- eventTime: The time that the trigger event occurred in MILLISECONDS
- additionalAuthenticationMethod.correlationId: A forter unique identifier that was provided as part of a Forter API response recommending additional authentication measures. Used to correlate between the user action which triggered the recommendation and the authentication attempt result. Required when the additional authentication was triggered by Forter's recommendation.
- additionalAuthenticationMethod.verificationOutcome: may take various forms depending on verification outcome. for example additionalAuthenticationMethod.verificationOutcome is a general authentication result enumerated field with 3 possible values: ["SUCCESS"; "FAILURE"; NONE_ATTEMPTED]
- Please see the Authentication result API Reference section for more details.
{
"accountId": "e520-ba9a-367-60b",
"eventTime": 1415287568000,
"connectionInformation": {
"customerIP": "10.0.0.127",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.73 Safari/537.36",
"forterTokenCookie": "2315688945984"
},
"channelType": "WEB",
"additionalAuthenticationMethod": {
"verificationOutcome": "SUCCESS",
"correlationId": "87363864834",
},
}Authentication Result API Response As this API is only used to provide Forter's model's additional information, the decision returned will always be "NOT_REVIEWED". Supplementary parameters like correlationId and accountId are also returned in the API response.
Send account status updates
The Account status API is used to provide Forter model's additional information: indication of accounts closed by the merchant or accounts that changed in status that reflect agreement or disagreement with Forter's sign up decision (use / ignore the decision). The Account status API is only intended to provide Forter with additional details and does NOT return a new decision. Rather, the response will always be "NOT_REVIEWED".
Account Status API Request
Main data points are:
- status: updated status (Forter enum format): enumerated values include: ("ACTIVE"; "SUSPENDED"; "CLOSED"; "GUEST"; "PENDING")
- statusChangeReason: Merchant descriptive reason for closing the account
{
"accountId": "e520-ba9a-367-60b",
"eventTime": 1415287568000,
"status": "SUSPENDED",
"statusChangeReason": "user violation of coupon abuse policy",
"connectionInformation": {
"customerIP": "10.0.0.127",
"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.73 Safari/537.36",
"forterTokenCookie": "2315688945984"
},
"type": "BUSINESS",
"merchantAccountStatus": "open",
"statusChangeBy": "MERCHANT_ADMIN"
}Prepare and Upload Historical Data
To ensure the highest level of accuracy for our decisioning model, Forter customizes our model to fit the specific risk profile of each of our customers. We achieve this by training the model with your past signup and login data in order to provide you with better accuracy from Day 1.
Complete Integration Tests
The purpose of Forter's integration tests is to make sure that your integration covers all relevant use cases, while still in the sandbox or test environment. Each use case may need a different combination of attributes and values.
To make sure you have covered each of the use cases we expect in your integration, please go through the test scenario list in the Integration Tests section of Portal. For each, you'll need to create the scenario in your sandbox site that will generate a call to Forter's API. Then, select the corresponding API request that Forter received and click Run to verify that the sample request meets the criteria.
Deploy to Production
Once the Integration tests have passed, and you've reviewed any gaps with a Forter Implementation Engineer please, deploy your code to your production environment, with two critical adjustments:
- Replace your Site ID and secret key with your production credentials.
- Update your Javascript snippet and Mobile SDKs to use your production Site ID and the production hash keys, if relevant.
Please note that this does not yet complete your integration. Until Forter has switched your site to Live (after Data Validation and Listen Mode), all Forter decisions will return "Not Reviewed".
Once in production, Forter uses a Data Validation tool to execute a set of automated tests across your live data in aggregation. The test outputs are daily reports that validate the accuracy and completeness of the production data we receive from you. You can monitor this output in Forter Portal under Integration Center Tools.
We recommend checking the report daily to identify any failed tests, which will prevent you from moving forward to Listen Mode.
In "listen mode", we will monitor the production traffic on your site and calibrate our models before we begin to provide you with decisions. This is a critical stage to ensure you meet your KPIs, and usually lasts around 7-14 days. Your Implementation Engineer will update you on the specific timeline for your integration.
During this time, Forter will continue to return "Not Reviewed" decisions in the API response.
Go Live
As Forter begins to send decisions and recommendations, confirm that your production site is handling responses as expected.