We now have roadblocks in place to prevent bad actors.

ShareGrid is a peer-to-peer marketplace where film and photo professionals can rent, buy and sell gear to other industry professionals. Since its founding in 2015, ShareGrid has amassed over $1 billion in inventory making owners on average $1000/month and saving renters over 30 - 50% vs. traditional rental options. Faced with a slow and expensive manual review process, ShareGrid automated ID checks with Berbix to entirely eliminate fraudulent chargebacks and save 1800 hours of internal human review per year.

Manually verifying users to prevent fraudulent chargebacks and equipment theft

Before automating identity verification using Berbix, ShareGrid required new users during onboarding to upload images of their IDs and the ShareGrid team verified all submitted documents through manual human review. This process proved to be extremely resource intensive requiring 1800 employee hours every year to analyze every document image provided. The quality of images uploaded exacerbated this problem as multiple cycles of document submission were needed due to poor image quality or users uploading unsupported document types such as social security numbers or foreign IDs.

Although obviously manipulated documents were caught, sophisticated bad actors were still able to bypass visual analysis checks that ShareGrid had in place. Even after visually inspecting the fronts of identity documents, Sia Shiva, COO & General Counsel at ShareGrid, noted that “without Berbix’s barcode analysis it was never definitive if an ID was fake.” In the event a fraudulent user made it through verification, these bad actors would often issue chargebacks claiming their rental was never received resulting in significant costs to ShareGrid and a degradation of trust within the marketplace.

Deterministic automatic verification with insight into all fraud signals

In addition to deterministically catching fake IDs, ShareGrid turned to Berbix over other identity document verification vendors as the only instant solution that provided the ability to customize their verification business logic as well as the insight as to how a verification result was determined. ShareGrid knew they wanted to automate verifications for the vast majority of new users, but still desired the flexibility to manually review specific cases. Using Berbix’s flag action mapping, ShareGrid configures their own unique risk tolerance specifying when users should be automatically rejected or manually reviewed. When reviewing specific verifications, Berbix flags provide ShareGrid all of the granular fraud signals that were instantly uncovered: fake ID propensity, selfie match likelihood, data mismatches, screen images, and more.

“Thanks to Berbix, we now have much more efficient roadblocks in place to prevent bad actors,” says Natalie Robles, ShareGrid’s Production Specialist. With confidence that Berbix is deterring fraudulent users, ShareGrid has since introduced an industry-leading owner guarantee that protects rentals up to $20,000 in value.  

Unfortunately, bad actors will still occasionally issue fraudulent chargeback claiming identity theft after legitimately verifying their own identities in the new Berbix experience. Thankfully, ShareGrid now has definitive proof to provide to law enforcement that an individual is in fact the renter using Berbix’s selfie comparison to the photo ID image and liveness detection. According to Melanie Neeler, Operations Manager at ShareGrid, “Law enforcement is very hesitant to investigate a case without the level of proof Berbix provides us. Being able to work effectively with law enforcement brings us peace of mind.”

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