We are back from Toronto and ESOMAR Congress 2022, the largest global summit for insights and analytics professionals. Fraud prevention was a top-of-mind issue among many attendees who expressed frustration that the bad actors seem to stay one step ahead of the industry’s efforts to thwart them.
We attended an excellent panel titled “Freeze, Fraudster! Keeping up with the evolving methods of survey imposters” that was reminiscent of a “Dateline” episode. Along with leading data quality experts from organizations like CloudResearch, Research Defender and Innovate MR, the panel featured current and former fraudsters whose identities were concealed as they described how they operate.
The panelists painted a picture of a never-ending arms race. The good guys try to verify respondents’ identities by deploying technologies that check IP addresses and use challenge questions to deter bots. The fraudsters find workarounds such as deploying more sophisticated VPN or IP proxies to get around the latest and greatest checks.
Our key takeaway – the industry needs to incorporate intrinsic security and fraud-prevention tools in every step of the process. We know the engagement created by the payment of an incentive plays a key role here, and we have some exciting current and upcoming features that turn the delivery of an incentive into an extremely effective fraud-reducing step in the participant journey.
Simplify, Simplify
Another challenge that came up numerous times in our conversations with market research leaders was how to make the process of fielding surveys and distributing payments more efficient and cost-effective, particularly when targeting international respondents.
We found that many organizations start with one payment type or provider, like gift cards, and as their programs become more complex, they decide to offer more rewards — either visa cards or cash or more diverse gift card portfolios — from additional providers. They find themselves having to spend substantial time on incentives aggregation and processing, taking away from their core mission.
As the incentive provider with the most global coverage in the industry, we can help market researchers consolidate their rewards selections on one platform to give their respondents the choice of digital or physical payments from over 4,000 brands anywhere in the world.
Meet Us in Las Vegas
Next up on our travel itinerary: Money 20/20 USA in Las Vegas the week of October 23. If you plan on attending, we’d love to meet with you to learn more about the challenges your business faces and show you how the Virtual Incentives platform can make delivering payments to your market research recipients quick and easy in ways they will find engaging and memorable.
Use this link to schedule a meeting or contact us anytime with questions about how we can help.