Janrain now includes a phone number-based fraud detector

Identity management provider Janrain is announcing what it says is the first anti-fraud, phone number-based detection built into this kind of service. The Portland, Oregon-based company enables a website visitor to use their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media credentials when they log in.

Director of Product Marla Hay told me that no other identity service, including the one from competitor Gigya, offers such a built-in, automatic anti-fraud scanning of a phone number. Phone numbers, she noted, tend to be more definitive identifiers than, say, email addresses.

When a user registers as a new subscriber on a site, Janrain will automatically validate whether the submitted phone number is active or whether it is associated with some fraudulent activity. The service can now also scan existing subscriber records, when there is an attempt to log in and be authenticated.

If someone moves and has not changed their phone number, the fraud score may reflect that the number is no longer valid. Hay noted that mobile numbers tend to change less frequently, since people often keep them even after moving.

The service also determines if the user’s IP address is connected with fraud. The phone number or IP address, for instance, could be connected with spam, or with attempts to log into sites multiple times.

If the phone number or IP address is definitely fraudulent, the resulting score will clearly show that, she said. If there are gray areas, the score will show less-than-spectacular results, so the site can make a decision.