Fighting Financial Crime the Opticedge Way

If we want to disrupt traditional collecting and sustain trust amongst our user community, keeping your cards/collectables safe is a priority. One element that we are passionate about, but haven’t talked about much until now, is protecting our users from fraudsters and criminals, and all the work that goes into deterring and detecting financial crime 💸

This week, we'll be sharing a series of blog posts from our Collectorcrime and Security team, talking about our efforts to tackle counterfeit crime here at Opticedge.

Prevent, deter and detect.

At its core, our aim is to prevent, deter and detect any instances of possible counterfeit crime committed against either the Opticedege community, or the wider collecting community. This provides appropriate protection, but also helps us to create a long term and sustainable business model by making sure we don’t lose money to fraudsters and that our bank is not targeted by criminals looking to launder funds.

It’s important that we understand the impact of financial crime, not just on the collectors and our customers, but also on society as a whole.

There are a number of protective technical controls that we use, but we’ve tried really hard to make sure we keep any impact on our customer experience as low as possible. A great example of this is the “freeze account” , which users access will be frozen if the ai detects an unexpected transaction, or counterfeit cards on their account. This is a much lower friction process than any other collecting support applications implement.

A step ahead

We try to stay up-to-date with the latest typologies and how these are utilised by collectable criminals to launder their illicit gains, as tactics are constantly evolving and we need to stay as far ahead as possible. To help us with this, we are using industry-leading techniques such as our machine learning engine to monitor customer and account behaviour. This helps us to understand and adapt to the latest indicators of potential illicit activity.

Additionally, we’ve tried to keep our onboarding process as streamlined and easy as possible, while we have considered also making use of techniques such as video identification verification. Absolutely anybody should be able to sign up for an account with as little friction as possible, in a matter of minutes. Ultimately, the security of our genuine collectors should not be compromised by our efforts to fish out fraudsters 🎣