complaint boards, and at the Better Business Bureau,” Samid says. “We structured and normalized the data and made it actionable.”
Other types of fraud protection on the market, he says, rely on algorithms and pattern analysis to detect suspicious charges. “No one has attempted to harness crowd knowledge,” Samid says. He says the challenges of collecting and processing such information have so far kept other companies from using such a method. Samid says the secret behind BillGuard’s technology is its team of developers, who previously served in the intelligence unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
BillGuard is still working on a sustainable revenue model. BillGuard’s service is currently free for individuals who want to monitor charges associated with their credit and bank cards. Samid says he plans to sell BillGuard’s services to banks on a per-user basis. The banks would include BillGuard as part of their respective online services. BillGuard has not yet been adopted by any banks, though Samid says he hopes to see some placements next year.
For now, users can register their cards at BillGuard’s website, after which they will receive daily scans to discover billing errors, suspected scams, hidden fees, and other dubious charges. Users are alerted by e-mail if an item requires immediate attention, and they receive monthly reports with overviews of their transactions.
Hackers who steal credit card numbers are not the only culprits BillGuard monitors. Samid says some merchants add charges that customers are not immediately aware of when purchases are made. That can include payments for services the customer may not want. “Some merchants are taking advantage of consumers be employing deceptive billing practices that are meant to make us misinformed about what we are paying for,” Samid says. “That is over 80 percent of what we are finding so far.”
BillGuard also plans to offer a service merchants can use to verify that their transactions with consumers are legit. Samid says merchants incur chargeback fees when banks reclaim funds stemming from customer complaints. BillGuard is developing a certification system that provides real-time data to merchants when customers file complaints. The system will include analytics to corroborate the validity of the charges. That would give merchants the chance to resolve issues directly with consumers before banks get involved. “The consumer clicks a button and gets their money back; the merchant gets a loyal customer and also avoid the chargeback fee,” Samid says. “The bank wouldn’t be told.”
