Patreon Accelerates Global Growth While Keeping Creators Safe with Sift
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19x return on investment
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99% new user acceptance rate
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Significant reduction in fraud losses
OVERVIEW
A Leading Creator Monetization Platform
Patreon gives creators the opportunity to build a community to confidently reach, engage, and get paid by their most valuable fans—with and beyond membership—no matter where they are on their journey. Hundreds of thousands of video creators, podcasters, musicians, writers, game developers, and more are achieving creative and financial freedom doing what they love on Patreon, powered directly by fans who love what they do.
Sift has been an invaluable partner in helping Patreon detect, mitigate, and prevent fraud on our platform.
Rick Hiltbrunner
Director of Fraud Operations at Patreon
CHALLENGE
Quickly Adapting to Growing, Costly Fraud
Patreon’s mission to empower creators by connecting them with their fans presents unique challenges in safeguarding content, securing accounts, and protecting payments across the platform. In addition to the complexity of their fraud prevention challenges, subscription and content creation industries face accelerated fraud trends, with 56% of subscription merchants seeing new threats emerge.
Unlike traditional e-commerce, where merchants can hold goods while verifying the cardholder identity, Patreon relies on real-time fund transfers. This makes it critical to instantly identify and prevent fraud, before an unauthorized transaction occurs. Payment fraud on Patreon often involves the use of stolen credit card credentials, leading to issues like money laundering and chargebacks. As Patreon expanded its global reach, chargeback volume and fees rose, straining resources.
With a rapidly growing community, Patreon also faced a challenge in moderating the vast amount of shared content and user listings. Manual review alone could not keep pace, creating an urgent need for an automated, scalable solution. Given its agile structure and limited fraud prevention measures, Patreon sought a flexible solution that would provide a seamless experience for creators and fans alike while adapting to evolving fraud tactics.
SOLUTION
Leveraging AI-Driven Automation to Simplify Complex Fraud Prevention
Having previously experienced great success with Sift’s automation capabilities at another company, the Patreon team decided to implement Sift to meet their unique needs. Within days, they had a fully customized machine learning model tailored to their requirements, plus access to the Sift Global Network of 1 trillion annual events.
By equipping Patreon with cross-dimensional identity intelligence and AI-powered risk assessments, the company’s Fraud Operations team can make more informed decisions with insights that reveal the identity story behind every user. For deeper investigations, the team uses the Sift Platform to analyze user behavior and uncover connections among potential fraud actors.
As they accelerated their global growth, Patreon was able to proactively spot fraud trends by using Sift’s investigation tools that provide on-demand analysis of interactions across the enterprise, enabling drill-down evaluation of their changing user behavior segments. Having access to this continuous analysis empowered Patreon to stay one step ahead of varying fraud threats as they expanded their user base.
I have been impressed not only with the Sift product, but also with the support that we’ve received. Sift consistently offers valuable expertise on various fraud trends and provides insightful recommendations to achieve better results.
Rick Hiltbrunner
Director of Fraud Operations at Patreon
RESULTS
Reducing Fraud Losses While Enhancing the User Experience
With Sift, Patreon continues to maintain a highly secure platform for its users, so fans can support creators without the constant worry of fraud. By implementing Sift, Patreon has significantly reduced fraud losses and maintained a low fraud rate, even as their community expanded. Sift’s comprehensive fraud detection and prevention capabilities ensure that Patreon creators and fans are safe, and its robust protection has built trust within the community.
By cultivating a trusted platform, Patreon can fully focus on delivering an experience that fosters connections between creators and their fans. The financial benefits of using Sift’s solutions are clear, with Patreon realizing a remarkable 19x return on investment. Patreon’s impressive 99.37% new user acceptance rate demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of Sift’s platform, allowing Pateron to welcome trusted customers without creating friction.
Sift has not only drastically reduced fraud on our platform, but also fostered a deeper sense of trust among Patreon, our members, and our creators, strengthening our community as a whole.
Rick Hiltbrunner
Director of Fraud Operations at Patreon
Dare to grow differently.
Flip the switch on fraud-fueled fear. Make risk work for your business and scale securely into new markets with Sift’s AI-powered platform.