Coinbase is the one of the largest digital currency exchanges in the world. We store about $1B of digital currency (bitcoin, litecoin, ether) on behalf of our users. Given the instant nature of digital currency and that it can't be revoked, we have one of the hardest payment fraud and security problems in the world. We are hit by the most sophisticated scammers constantly and consequently we are at the forefront of the fight against fraud. We've witnessed and solved loopholes exploited by fraudsters years ahead of the broader industry (e.g., vulnerabilities in second-factor tokens delivered by SMS, phone porting attacks, loopholes in online identity verification, etc.).
In this talk, I'll present examples of scammer trends and techniques we've seen through the past years. I'll also talk about our risk program that relies on rules-based systems, supervised and unsupervised machine learning as well as highly-skilled human fraud fighters.
Soups Ranjan heads Financial Crime Risk at Revolut, the fastest growing challenger bank in Europe. He leads the team in charge of preventing financial crime on Revolut’s platform using data science and machine learning. Soups has 14 years of experience applying machine learning to domains ranging from network security to advertising and cryptocurrencies. Prior to Revolut, Soups was the director of data science and risk at Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
At Coinbase, Soups built many engineering teams from the ground up including data, risk and identity. Soups is the co-founder of RiskSalon.org, a roundtable forum for risk professionals in San Francisco and Seattle to share ideas on stopping financial crime. Soups holds a PhD in ECE focused on network security from Rice University. Soups currently lives in Berkeley with his family.