How Couchsurfing creates a safe platform for travelers worldwide
99%
Increase in review accuracy
Increased customer satisfaction
Lower amounts of fraudulent, spammy, and abusive content
OVERVIEW
Global travel marketplace
Couchsurfing is a global marketplace, dedicated to connecting travelers around the world. Founded in 2004, Couchsurfing offers a social experience whether users wish to stay with locals, meet up with like-minded folks in their home cities, or host travelers with a place to stay. Couchsurfers can make connections via desktop site and mobile app, and make up a community of over 18 million people in more than 200,000 cities.
CHALLENGE
Acting proactively, not reactively, to fraudulent content and repeat offenders
As a community, Couchsurfing operates on a currency of trust. Fake accounts and spammy content not only affect the experience for legitimate users of the platform, they might even involve phishing, malicious comments, or further risk when linked to offline schemes. To prevent this off-platform movement, Couchsurfing built in-house tools that were clunky, led to lots of manual review, and became outdated quickly. They needed a solution that could address a variety of bad content, malicious users, and returning users who were hiding their identity after being banned.
Furthermore, there was no way to proactively improve safety for the community by preventing these bad users from creating fraudulent content. Couchsurfing needed to determine who the bad users were and ensure they couldn’t come back—even if disguised under a different name, email, IP address, or device. They required something that could help them proactively fight and prevent content abuse, fake accounts, and other forms of fraud on their platform.
SOLUTION
Greater efficiency thanks to automated content abuse detection
The team looked at dozens of vendors of all types, ranging from member reputation systems to identity solutions. There were many solutions that had visually impressive tools, but lacked a robust fraud detection engine that delivered the results they needed. Sift not only provided a stellar user experience, but also best-in-class machine learning technology and platform infrastructure.
Upon adopting Sift, the team’s efficiency greatly improved—they discovered thousands of spammy accounts, all previously hidden. Prior to integration, the team would have to manually go through an ever growing list of bad users daily, including accounts flagged by community reports. With Sift, at least 50-70% of actions are now automated, freeing the team to focus on other work including learning more about the behaviors of their good and bad users in the Sift dashboard.
RESULTS
Bad actors stopped in their tracks before they can act
The team is now operating much more efficiently. It’s not just about saving hours of time, but also pre-empting support tickets and user complaints by finding fraudulent users before they can negatively impact the community. Spam, scams, and other malicious intent are much better controlled, and the company is looking forward to its next era of growth.
Couchsurfing wants people to make lifelong friends, discover cities they otherwise never would have ventured to, and trust the community enough to open up their own couches to strangers. With Sift, Couchsurfing can help ensure users it is a safe and trusted marketplace and community of strangers, but not fraudsters.
