IPQS
Getting Started
Device Fingerprinting for Fraud Prevention & User Validation

The IPQS Device Fingerprint Technology allows you to further analyze your users, transactions, ad traffic, and similar data to produce highly accurate Fraud Scores. Multi-layered AI & machine learning algorithms analyze user behavior and intent against millions of patterns to accurately identify high-risk activity. Hundreds of data points are scored to produce a confident result for fraud prevention.

Track user accounts with a unique Device ID to detect duplicate accounts and similar risky behavior. Cross-device tracking using our device fingerprinting API also detects device spoofing, emulators, bots, location spoofing, GPS tampering, and similar patterns of malicious abuse. Use the API docs below to quickly set up the service on your website or app.

Test IPQS device fingerprinting data by getting a free fingerprint of your own device

 

What Is Device Fingerprinting?

Device Fingerprinting is the process of creating a device tracking ID and risk profile based on a user's device behavior and settings. The IPQS device fingerprinting service creates a unique device ID to track users as they interact with your site and better understand quality based on a user's behavior during login, checkout, account creation, and similar actions.

 

What Is a Device Fingerprinting API?

Device Fingerprinting APIs profile devices in real time to calculate a unique device ID and risk profile based on the behavior and settings of the user's device. IPQS device fingerprinting produces accurate risk scores based on the quality of the user's device and behavior. For example, non-human bot behavior indicates malicious activity and increases the risk score. Unique device IDs allow a website to accurately identify users with multiple accounts or high-risk payments.

 

When to Use a Device Fingerprinting API

Using a Device Fingerprint API is a best practice to detect fraud during registration, payment, checkout, and similar user actions. The device API can provide real-time results that can enrich user accounts and payment data. It can also retrieve a device risk score and a device ID that you can use to track the user across your website.

 

Device Fingerprinting Use Cases

  • Low-Quality Users: Identify duplicate user accounts, bogus user information, and fake registrations. Automatically prevent low-quality users from hurting your ROI.

  • Click Fraud & Invalid Clicks: Solve click fraud quality issues with real-time click filtering and ensure only high-quality clicks.

  • Chargebacks & Payment Fraud: Prevent chargebacks, high-risk transactions, and all types of payment ecommerce fraud.

  • Account Takeover: Monitor accounts for unusual behavior and session hijacking attempts.

  • Bot Detection: Filter non-human traffic in real-time with IPQS bot detection tools.

  • High-Risk Behavior: Analyze user behavior against millions of high-risk patterns that indicate a user's intent to engage in fraudulent activity.
Getting Started with the Device Fingerprint API

After creating a Device Fingerprint Tracker, you will be presented with a script to include on your website to analyze behavior. We recommend placing this script on a funnel page or through a critical flow of your website, such as the registration, login, or checkout/payment page. It is also helpful for filtering impressions, clicks, redirects, and similar actions. You may create unique trackers for different pages or sites.

Usage

It is best practice to associate a request with an identifying piece of information such as a userID, clickID, or transactionID. With each device fingerprinting request, you can pass any Custom Tracking Variables established in your account settings. Doing so allows our reporting tools to filter by specific users, products, campaigns, transactions, and more so you can easily identify fraudulent activity. Pass your value(s) to our script, as seen below, to take advantage of this feature.

 

Note: Always place the variable storage code after the initial Device Fingerprint JavaScript tag. Additionally, you must establish all tracking variables in your account settings before passing them through the device fingerprinting API. 

 

 

Additional options for deploying device fingerprinting within your application are detailed in Advanced Options.

Fetching Device Fingerprint API Results

Our system allows you to execute a function after it has finished compiling the results. You can use this for a variety of reasons. The most common include:

  • Recording the device ID to confirm results (see documentation on our API confirmation callback below).

  • Appending the device ID to a form (so you can only allow purchases or completions from devices with clean fraud scores).

  • For performing additional processing or business logic in conjunction with other fraud prevention.

  • For redirecting bots and actual users to different versions of your site.

You can specify a function to execute after our API returns its result by adding something like this after the script tag on the tracker page.

Example Results

This is an example success response in JSON format. Details about each of these variables can be found in Response Parameters.

Next Steps

Tailor your API requests to match your specific needs with additional request parameters and other advanced options. Or learn more about each of the variables included in the responses you receive.

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