Our recent webinar hosted by Oscar Carlsson, Chief Innovation Officer, provided an overview of industry data quality trends and outlined what Cint is doing to help.
Cint remains on a mission to improve data quality and mitigate fraud, with Oscar Carlsson, Cint’s Chief Innovation officer, having recently hosted a webinar in which he outlined the latest developments in the marketplace.
Carlsson pointed to various types of organized fraud affecting different industries; warning that the market research industry is now ‘playing catch up’. What’s more, with the entrance of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, there are new ways for fraudsters to game the system, he warned.
Fortunately, there is much industry-wide collaboration taking place to battle threats; such as the creation of a new umbrella organization, Global Data Quality, while Cint remains focused on creating and implementing a number of pioneering quality-related programs and policies.
Protecting customers, respondents and partners
That said, there are organized, global networks of fraud which have ‘turned link manipulation into a plug and play activity’, according to John Brackett, Director of Product, who joined Carlsson on the webinar. “More and more people can join an organized group and wreak havoc in our industry,” he said.
Currently, there are two primary areas of fraud: Ghost completes and script fraud. The former is when users qualify for an incentive as if they had completed a study and yet no data is collected, while the latter involves high velocity bot automation. Brackett adds: “As fraudsters become more sophisticated, they may slow down the velocity in an attempt to look more realistic, meaning that the number one detector is then poor, open ends, on the client side.”
Whatever the format, the impact of fraud can be devastating: From rising costs to lost revenue – not to mention a lack of trust disrupting the entire ecosystem, undermining end-client confidence in the online industry as a whole.
Generating reliable data at scale
Fortunately, Cint is in a unique position to help combat this problem, with its unified platform combining the power of Cint and Lucid, and seeing more respondent trend data than any other. And so, having observed a spike in fraudulent activity at the end of 2022, the team set out to monitor patterns and the effectiveness of fraud prevention solutions.
The critical ingredients for success here lie in both detection – being able to spot patterns across thousands of customers, partners and billions of transactions – and action, thanks to cutting edge proprietary technology and AI and leading third party tools.
To this end, Cint has doubled down on trust and safety, for instance via an industry-first partnership between Cint and Forsta – designed to drive a reduction in survey fraud, via a ground-breaking server-to-server (S2S) integration.
“We value collaboration with our customers,” said Jimmy Snyder, VP, Trust and Safety Operations. “It’s important for our customers to share with us as much data as possible when it comes to any quality related concerns”
The future of automated digital market research
Cint remains extremely optimistic about future progress and continued development, thanks to dedicated teams, a data-driven approach and a range of programs dedicated to improving quality such as digital fingerprinting and attention checkers. Data science and AI is helping here, too, of course – enabling smarter ways to fortifyand protect data transmission.
But with fraud ever evolving, constant innovation is required. So, to this end, the webinar included a snapshot of Cint’s ongoing activities and future roadmap, including bank account validation; an open end question checker; upgraded third party tools; the scoring of hosted panel registration checks; and secured survey hosting platforms.
In addition, auditing third party tools, developing internal solutions and doubling down on the quality of our panel management platform – including securing the payout process to ensure bad actors never receive rewards for their fraudulent activity – adds to the secure foundation we continue building from. Cint is also testing a new bot detection technology and preparing to implement a proprietary respondent quality scoring model.
“This is set to have a significant impact on catching bad actors,” said Brackett. “And because it is based on data science it’s also a learning model.”
Indeed, the webinar concluded by emphasizing the importance of remaining focused on optimisation and innovation as well as collaboration; working together to ensure a high quality ecosystem for all. “We are in this together,” said Carlson.
