News

Self-service payments firm foils Russian counterfeiters

March 6, 2014

Recently and virtually overnight, Russia's monetary system saw a huge influx of counterfeit currency in 1,000 ruble ($27.73) and 5,000 ruble ($138.65) denominations. Due to the large scale of the attack, many Russian banks had to disable acceptance of the banknotes.

For Russian multichannel payment services provider QIWI, this might have been disastrous. More than 60 million Russian customers depend on the company's fleet of 100,000 self-service kiosks and 15 million e-wallets for payment of their monthly bills.

"When QIWI turned to us, they needed a large-scale fraud prevention solution for many billions of transactions per year," said Constantin von Altrock, managing director at IRIS Analytics. "And they needed the solution to be implemented very quickly."

Working with distribution partner Wincor Nixdorf, IRIS installed its end-to-end fraud prevention solution on QIWI's existing commodity server cluster. The 5-week implementation project incorporated all of the fraud model generation needed to combat the specific fraud patterns QIWI had been experiencing.

"By using IRIS, we were able to analyze the denomination of banknotes inserted, profile the kiosks and follow the money trail through our Visa QIWI Wallet," said Anton Kuranda, chief security officer at QIWI. "We were able to prevent fraud while continuing to accept banknotes."