Online fraud continues to be a challenge for merchants as stolen credit card numbers become more easily accessible. A single fraud attack can sink a business, especially one that’s just getting off the ground. Startups have often struggled to keep up with fraud management due to a lack of dedicated resources, and large enterprises pay significant transaction fees for the type of protection they need.
Today, we’ve released enhanced fraud tools, adding an additional layer of protection to any Braintree merchant at no additional cost. With this enhancement, we’re providing massive savings to large retailers and giving startups access to the type of fraud tools they need to expand their business.
We spoke with Vlad Gurgov, CTO and Co-Founder of Virool, the social video advertising platform that helps brands, musicians, movie and game studios to get their videos noticed. Virool is a well-funded startup, powering video campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands. They recently switched to Braintree after experiencing a fraudulent attack on their business using stolen credit cards with their previous provider. Vlad shared his recent experience on how a card fraud can harm online businesses.
Tell us about Virool and how you’ve grown so quickly.
We are a video promotion network working with over 15,000 publishers and over 120,000 advertisers including brands, music labels, movie studios and advertising agencies to get videos noticed across sites, games and apps around the globe. Today, we promote more than 6,000 videos every month, with customers in Australia, Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America.
We developed a self-serve system that helps thousands of users- everyone from small bands spending a few hundred dollars to some of the biggest brands and agencies in the world spending hundreds of thousands every month. Ever since we started we realized the huge demand for our service as our volume increased every month. Even though we offered other payment methods, credit card transactions were bringing majority of our revenue, with some clients making payments up to $50,000 for urgent campaign purchases.
Fraud is something you’ve experienced before. Can you tell us a bit more about what happened and your switch to Braintree?
As our business grew and became more well-known, we started to attract some fraudsters. They had used a database of stolen credit cards on our site to complete transactions, resulting in a high number of chargebacks. While it was still small percentage of our volume, it was enough of a risk to have our account shut down. Although this type of fraudulent attack could happen to anyone, it impacted Virool because we didn’t have access to the type of fraud protection tools that would have prevented it with our previous provider. We built our own fraud monitoring rules into our systems, however, it was very time-consuming and we lacked the internal resources to manage it. Although they helped with guard against most fraud, we still were not 100% protected, as fraudsters started to improve their techniques as well.
We were thrilled to find out that Braintree offered a solution that would help us manage fraud on their end without needing us to dedicate resources or integrate with a third party. The switch to Braintree was simple, and they helped us get up and running quickly. We completed the integration in hours and within two days, and were able to continue accepting payments without disruption to the business. As we continue to expand internationally, we’re confident we have the right partner to help us recognize fraudulent activity and take appropriate actions immediately.
Welcome to Braintree Vlad and the entire Virool team. We look forward to working with you.
To learn more about our fraud protection offering, please visit www.braintreepayments.com/fraud-protection.