Fighting payment fraud in bitcoin exchanges

Coinbase is the one of the largest digital currency exchanges in the world. We store above $10B 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.