The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) aims to increase networking and information-sharing between merchants to help them to successfully fight online fraud. The organization has more than 900 members representing over 300 member companies across the globe. The organization recently selected iovation's (News - Alert) ReputationManager 360 solution as a finalist for its Emerging Technology Award (METAward).

ReputationManager 360 assists companies in eliminating fraud losses by stopping cyber criminals before they can harm their businesses. The solution achieves this by making use of the power of device identification, device reputation and real-time risk reporting. With the help of this solution, customers can immediately recognize suspicious activity, and estimate the size and scope of a problem, thereby easily stopping repeat offenders, the company stated in a press release.

“While leading merchants recognized iovation's ReputationManager 360 solution for its groundbreaking features last year, this year they have taken notice of its exploding customer base and the vast number of devices for which we manage reputation,” said Jon Karl, vice president of Corporate Development at iovation. “This customer and device knowledge ecosystem – baked into ReputationManager 360 – makes our solution extremely unique and powerful.”

The company has stated that iovation's ReputationManager 360 fraud protection service makes use of the largest device reputation repository in the world. This includes monitoring transaction anomalies, velocities, and geolocation. While doing this, the company does not collect any personally identifiable information (PII).

In other news, iovation recently announced that it has seen a significant spike in online dating site fraud in the past 12 months. Using its ReputationManager 360 solution to identify computers, mobile phones and tablets used to commit fraud, iovation found that 3.8 percent of the total transactions it processed for online dating sites in 2011 were fraudulent – more than a 150 percent increase over the 1.4 percent in 2010 and 1.5 percent in 2009. To date, iovation has stopped almost 60 million fraud attempts on dating websites.