EMAIL FRAUD SCORE are an essential element of identity verification and fraud prevention — but they’re also one of the easiest pieces of customer data for fraudsters to create, forge or spoof. That’s why EMAIL FRAUD SCORE helps you detect and stop more fraudulent activity by combining email address metadata points with real-time risk indicators.

Email Fraud Score

Fraudsters often use email addresses that don’t exist, are from high-risk countries, belong to disposable mail services or have been used for fraudulent transactions in the past. Our Email Risk Score evaluates these signals and many others to determine a unique email authentication risk level, based on how likely the email address is to be a phishing attempt or a malicious email domain. The email local part risk score also looks at the format of the address, analyzing for a high number of consecutive numbers that don’t match a birth year or a string of random letters such as “j4n3d03” or “janedoe.”

We studied a variety of email stimuli and asked participants to make ordinal-scale judgements about whether the emails were phishing or legitimate. By dichotomizing responses and calculating a participant’s D-prime score (based on formulas reported in the literature), we could assess whether a particular group was more susceptible to responding to emails based on the time pressure under which they were presented (intuitive decision-making) or to make rational judgments after careful consideration of the email content (rational decision-making). The results show that a higher D-prime score is associated with greater accuracy in email detection.