Beat Fraud Prevention Case Study

What is Beat?

Beat is a technology company and the fastest growing ride-hailing app in Latin America. The company was founded in 2011 and is part of the FREE NOW group, the ride-hailing joint venture of BMW and Daimler. Beat creates a new ride experience by connecting thousands of passengers with nearby available drivers in real-time. Through the app, you can request a driver 24/7. Beat is more than an app that takes you from A to B. Beatexis to build technology for a better urban life and become part of people’s lives by making transportation in modern megacities more affordable, convenient, efficient, and safe while providing economic opportunities to thousands of people who wish to earn income as drivers. Beat is currently available in Greece, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, with plans to expand to more countries in Latin America, and has a Tech Innovation and Engineering Hub in Amsterdam, in the heart of The Netherlands.

Facing the Challenge

Every marketer knows the nightmare that fraudulent activity can be. For ride-hailing companies specifically, ad fraud can eat up advertising dollars at lightning speed.

Vitaly Kudryavcev, the Senior Digital Media Specialist at Beat, knew about fraud’s detrimental impact on performance marketing – not only wasting ad budgets but on reporting integrity. With the aggressive goals that Beat has for scaling user acquisition efficiently, they knew they needed the industry’s most reliable and extensive fraud detection and prevention provider.

The company works with both passenger acquisition (acquiring riders), as well as driver acquisition. In practice, this means that they use a larger variety of media sources than most marketers, including non-app sources, like web display ads. This opens Beat up to various targeted fraud schemas, with the different sources susceptible to different forms of fraud. Organic poaching, in particular, was a key concern.

Another major challenge for Beat is its hyperlocalization strategy, mainly to the city level, making segmenting fraudulent activity tricky.

The Solution

The team at Beat chose Singular’s Next-gen Attribution and Analytics solution to measure, analyze and optimize their entire marketing program. And Singular’s superior Fraud Prevention Suite was one of the key reasons why. With more detection methods than any other MMP, including proprietary methods, and Singular’s dedicated cybersecurity team, Beat was confident that they would have the best protection available.

“As Beat tests new acquisition channels on both sides all the time, we need strict monitoring and an array of methods to catch any type of fraud that we may face,” said Vitaly. To widen their reach and strengthen their fraud-catching net, some of the methods they have utilized include Android Install Validation, iOS Install Validation, Geobleeding, Short TTIs, and Organic Poaching Detection.

For organic poaching, an increasingly common fraud scheme, Singular is the only provider with thorough organic poaching detection, and helps to keep the Beat team at ease. To date, they have managed to catch 70% of fraud through this method.

Pre-attribution rejection has really helped them to weed out and block fraud before attribution, unlike many other methods that only label and block fraud after the fact. “To date we have saved more than €50K in marketing costs since 2019 by not relying on misreporting when optimizing our campaigns and thereby, not paying for fraud in the first place. We have also saved dozens of hours not having to go back to ad networks to reconcile our invoices. It’s huge,” Vitaly enthused.

With advanced, flexible reporting Beat has the most transparent views into how fraudsters target them and can quickly investigate rejected, suspicious, and protected traffic sources, drilled down to the publisher, campaign, geo, and site level. “We really like Singular’s clean and easy-to-analyze fraud insights and visualization of fraud metrics to understand how fraudsters are targeting our apps and see how our ROI is being protected,” Vitaly added. “Specifically within the suspicious report, we really appreciate being able to dig deeper into instances of suspicious traffic and forward them on to our ad partners to dig into the data and provide answers, without blocking what could be real users and activity until we have concrete information.”

Having control over how fraudulent activity is defined and treated is another huge benefit for the team that utilizes “and/or conditions” within a combination of fraud detection and prevention methods. The customization ability has been particularly helpful in relation to their hyperlocalization strategies as they can create custom strategies per market based on the level of fraudulent activity per area. Most other providers only allow global rules. “Singular has empowered us with custom fraud rules that give us complete control over how to take action on fraud. We can decide whether to turn on and off preset rejection rules, or create custom rules to reject or flag fraudulent installs. Singular has really given us precision control to dictate exactly how aggressive our fraud prevention is,” said Vitaly.

Success in Numbers

Of course, we all rely on the data to best tell our stories, and numbers don’t lie.

For Beat, the success of working with Singular’s fraud detection and prevention suite is evident. Let’s put a spotlight on the stats:

€50K marketing budget saved
8 custom rules set up
92% decrease in suspicious traffic
4.45% rejected installs over the past year

A picture speaks a thousand words: Beat’s drop in fraudulent activity after beginning to work with Singular’s Fraud suite in 2019.

“Our customer success team at Singular is really attentive and focused on working with us to implement the right mix of solutions to best meet our challenges. We presented our needs to them, and they consider their full array of detection methods to mold the right multi-channeled fit for us. We feel like they are an extension of our team, really dedicated to catching every potential fraudulent case, just as we are.”

Vitaly Kudryavcev,
Senior Digital Media Specialist at Beat