Persona Help Center
Blocking known fraudsters using Lists and Workflows
Persona helps organizations deter, detect, and deny fraud. In this video, we’ll introduce one specific solution to help deny repeat fraudsters. The solution involves Workflows and Lists. Before we begin, here’s a brief refresher on these two topics:
- Workflows automate and orchestrate your identity processes. With it, you can set custom rules, perform additional actions when a user completes a flow, apply conditional logic, and more.
- With Lists, you provide information to Persona, for example, email addresses or ID numbers associated with previous fraud attacks. Persona can then compare user-provided information against your lists to find matches.
If you’re not familiar with the Workflows product and our Lists feature, check out the introductory materials linked below this video before proceeding.
To begin, we need to create a List. Using the left-side navigation bar, go to Lists and press the Add New List button. In the popup modal, you’ll be asked to specify a name for the list and select a list type.
For this demonstration, we’re going to create a list of Government ID numbers associated with known fraudsters. Click the Add Item button, which launches another popup modal. This time, we’ll provide information on a specific item that we want to add to the list. Because I’m using the government ID list type, each new item requires me to specify the ID type and ID number.
Different list types will require different inputs. Check out our documentation on list types linked below this video if you’d like to learn more.
Persona also provides API endpoints to create and manage your Lists as an alternative to using the Persona Dashboard.
After you’ve created one or more Lists, we’ll turn our attention to Workflows. While a List houses the information, we rely on Workflows to automate actions and decisions when we receive information that matches a List.
Using Workflows, we can look for List matches on all future Inquiries. If Persona finds matching information, the Workflow can trigger an action such as:
- Automatically accepting or declining the inquiry
- Automatically marking the inquiry for review
- Or creating a case
Let’s jump into Workflows and demonstrate one example of how you can build this.
In my Organization, I have an existing Workflow that is triggered to run each time an Inquiry is completed. Let’s briefly summarize what the Workflow is doing before we make any edits to it.
After an end user completes the inquiry flow, we check on some device and behavioral signals. For example, if we detect that the individual used a Tor Browser during the inquiry flow, we apply a tag of “TOR DETECTED” to the inquiry.
The Workflow then uses conditional logic to determine whether to mark the Inquiry for manual review or automatically approve it.
Let’s add some new branches into the Workflow using the List that we made earlier. I want this Workflow to do the following:
- Perform additional tagging if we find a Government ID number that matches an item on our list
- And automatically decline any Inquiries with this new tag
Returning back to our Workflow, I’m adding a new branch to the existing Parallel step.
In the new branch, I’m adding a Conditional Step to see if the Government ID number from each Inquiry matches any number on the list.
If there is a match, we’ll apply a tag of “KNOWN FRAUDSTER ID NUMBER” to the Inquriy.
With that set, let’s go further down the Workflow and update the Inquiry Decisioning. Right now, we have a Conditional Step with two branches. I’ll add a new route to automatically decline Inquiries with the “KNOWN FRAUDSTER ID NUMBER” tag.
To recap — in this video, we created a list for ID numbers associated with known fraudsters. We added items to that list using the Persona dashboard.
Afterwards, we updated an existing Workflow to tag and decline Inquiries when Persona finds a Government ID number that matches a number of the aforementioned list.
Check out the resources below if you’d like to explore further: