AWS automates fraud detection

Amazon’s cloud computing platform is managing the process of detecting potential online fraud events.

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is releasing Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully-managed service that identifies potentially fraudulent online activities like online payment and identity fraud. Using machine learning and based on the same fraud detection technology used by Amazon.com, Amazon Fraud Detector is designed to locate potentially fraudulent activity in milliseconds, with no machine learning expertise required for users.

With a few clicks in the Amazon Fraud Detector console, customers can select a pre-built machine learning model template, upload historical event data, and create decision logic to assign outcomes to the predictions (such as initiating a fraud investigation when the machine learning model predicts potentially fraudulent activity). 

Customer data is uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), where it is encrypted in transit and at rest and used to customize the model’s training. Users only need to provide any two attributes associated with an event (e.g. logins, new account creation, etc.) and can optionally add other data (e.g. billing address or phone number). Based upon the type of fraud customers want to predict, Amazon Fraud Detector will pre-process the data, select an algorithm, and train a model. 

Developers with machine learning experience who want to extend what Amazon Fraud Detector delivers can customize Amazon Fraud Detector using a combination of machine learning models built with Amazon Fraud Detector and those built with Amazon SageMaker (a fully-managed service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly). Amazon Fraud Detector is available in northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Ireland, Singapore, and Sydney, Australia, with availability in additional regions in the coming months.

“Customers of all sizes and across all industries have told us they spend a lot of time and effort trying to decrease the amount of fraud occurring on their websites and applications,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon machine learning, Amazon Web Services Inc. “By leveraging 20 years of experience detecting fraud coupled with powerful machine learning technology, we’re excited to bring customers Amazon Fraud Detector so they can automatically detect potential fraud, save time and money, and improve customer experiences—with no machine learning experience required.”