Fixing the blind spots in fraud prevention

Fraud prevention fails when you can’t see what’s happening on your platform. Most companies rely on basic fraud prevention tools that only scratch the surface, leaving them blind to deeper patterns of fraud, account takeover, and even financial crimes like money laundering and identity theft. Without the right insights, teams are left guessing—and by the time they respond, it’s often too late.

To uncover hidden threats, many teams export data to external tools like Datadog, Amplitude, or Tableau. These tools are great for data visualization, but they slow down the process, forcing teams to switch between platforms and delaying action. By the time fraud is visible, it’s already evolved.

At Castle, we believe you should never have to leave your platform to both see and stop fraud. That’s why we built a unified system that lets you analyze and act on fraud insights instantly, all in one place.

Act on fraud insights without leaving the platform

Castle eliminates the need to export data to external tools by combining advanced analytics with real-time fraud prevention solutions in one place. Instead of switching between platforms, you can visualize fraud patterns, dig into the details, and take action instantly—all without leaving the platform.

Whether it’s identifying suspicious activity, account takeover, uncovering hidden links between accounts, or detecting potential financial crime, Castle enables teams to go from insight to action in seconds—without leaving the platform. Here’s how it works:

• Instant rule creation: Castle lets you create real-time rules with no limitations. You can take the most advanced aggregations of historical data and turn them into actions in real time.
• Intuitive interface for everyone: Whether you're technical or not, Castle's design allows anyone to analyze data, create rules, and respond to fraud quickly—without relying on external fraud prevention measures.
• Enriched data at your fingertips: Events are enriched instantly with data like device fingerprints, machine learning scores, social security numbers, and disposable email checks. No delays from external dependencies mean more effective fraud prevention.
• Tailored visualizations: Castle’s visualizations are built to help teams find the needle in the haystack. Zoom from macro trends to individual users in seconds, helping you find bad actors and prevent fraud faster than ever.

By integrating these features, Castle eliminates the need for external tools, letting teams move from insight to action within a single, unified fraud prevention program. No more waiting, no more blind spots.

Fraud patterns you can act on

Effective fraud prevention strategies are more than just detection. It’s about spotting patterns, making connections, and acting fast. With Castle’s suite of visualization tools—from Explore View to Link Analysis—you can dive deep into your data to uncover hidden relationships and fraudulent activity like credit card fraud or gift card scams in real time. Whether you're analyzing user activity, spotting shared devices across accounts, or identifying outliers in a heatmap, Castle gives you the power to visualize and act on your data seamlessly.

Filtering for immediate action

The Explore View is designed to make filtering, querying, and visualizing suspicious activity intuitive and fast. We reimagined the familiar interfaces from popular log aggregation tools and tailored them specifically for fraud prevention solutions. Castle keeps all the depth and power of these tools but simplifies the presentation to make it usable for anyone—from security engineers to product managers running fraud prevention programs.

With just a few clicks, you can filter on any property—whether it’s device fingerprints, credit card numbers, bot scores, gift cards, or custom event types—without writing complex queries. This means you can drill down from high-level trends right into granular details, identifying suspicious activity like spikes of account takeover attempts or coordinated use of gift cards.

But Castle isn’t just for finding the problems—it’s for solving them, too. Once you’ve spotted warning signs of suspicious activity or fraudulent behavior, you can create rules on the fly and implement them immediately. No exporting data, no delays. Everything from login attempts to custom API events is filterable and actionable, right in the same flow.

Uncovering fraud patterns

The Heatmap visualization takes the basic idea of trend analysis and turns it up a notch. While you could plot events over time with a bar chart, a heatmap lets you visualize three dimensions at once—time, volume, and intensity. For fraud detection and preventing potential fraud risk, this is essential. Patterns emerge in ways traditional charts can’t capture.

Heatmaps are especially useful for spotting outliers. Say there’s a spike in bot scores at a specific hour of the day or a sudden wave of suspicious login attempts. A heatmap makes it easy to zero in on these moments. And the best part? You can drill down from the heatmap to see the specific events, users, or devices behind the pattern. One click and you’re investigating the exact details.

Unlike other systems where you’re stuck with predefined views, Castle’s heatmap is fully customizable. Choose any field or score—bot score, triggered signals, disposable email use, or even credit card numbers—and turn it into a heatmap. It’s fraud detection built for agility, letting you go from a wide-angle view to micro-level analysis in seconds.

Visualizing activity across entities

The Activity Matrix offers a side-by-side comparison of user behavior across different entities—users, devices, IPs, credit cards, or even custom properties. This matrix functions like a dynamic timeline, helping you see if activities overlap or reveal suspicious patterns across multiple accounts.

If you suspect a coordinated attack or identity theft, the Activity Matrix shows whether the logins, device usage, or other potential fraud risks match up across entities. You can also drill into specific timeframes to investigate exact actions and properties tied to each one. This real-time visualization of behavior brings potential fraud into focus before the perpetrators have time to hide.

By splitting the matrix by any property—software type, IP, device fingerprint, credit card—you can easily spot shared behaviors or discrepancies. It’s the perfect tool for quickly surfacing hidden connections and getting ahead of financial losses or fraud.

Uncover hidden fraud networks

Fraud rarely happens in isolation. Fraudsters operate through networks of linked accounts, device fingerprints, and credit card numbers to exploit vulnerabilities. The Link Analysis feature is built to reveal these hidden relationships, helping you prevent financial crime and identity theft by seeing the bigger picture.

With a single click, you can reveal shared connections between users, IP addresses, devices, or payment methods. Imagine a case of multi-accounting: multiple accounts tied to the same device fingerprint or IP address. Or promo abuse, where accounts share a shipping address. With Link Analysis, these relationships are instantly visualized, turning a complex fraud network into an interactive map you can explore.

Once you’ve uncovered the connections, you can drill into the specific accounts, credit card numbers, or devices involved to take action immediately. It’s not just about seeing the fraud—it’s about understanding how it’s happening and stopping it before it spreads.

Stopping fraud, not just finding it

Fraud isn’t just a pattern waiting to be discovered—it’s an active, evolving threat. The more visibility you have, the better your fraud prevention strategies can respond. Castle was built with one goal in mind: to give you full visibility into your platform and let you act on fraud risks without delay. From Explore View’s filters to Heatmap’s trend analysis and Link Analysis’ network mapping, Castle turns blind spots into clear insights and helps you stop fraud in its tracks—before it leads to financial losses or identity theft.

Fraud moves fast. With Castle, you move faster.