About Tamas Kadar: Tamas Kadar is an entrepreneur and former founder of Central Europe’s first crypto exchange. When his enterprise was targeted by fraudsters, he pivoted to offering fraud prevention technology. His newest firm, SEON, now protects 5000+ companies worldwide and raised the largest ever Series A funding in Hungary.
In this exclusive Cyber Talk interview, CEO Tamas Kadar shares distinctive insights into how merchants can protect the brands with tools that leverage open data analysis and machine learning. He also delves into cyber crime trends and business strategies that can help you quickly reshape systems, advance processes, and deliver on next-generation leadership.
What challenges are you seeing around fraud and fraud detection?
Over the years, we’ve observed a dramatic rise in fraud activities around the world and yet many businesses are ill-equipped to fend off these threats.
With Covid-19 on the rise, many different industries were compelled to adapt to different ways of operating on the internet. Curfews and lockdowns made the physical world more virtual than ever before. We’ve seen certain retailers prosper and others struggle, but at the end of the day, nearly all they have to do is alter the way they do business.
Tell us about the SEON story
In the beginning, my co-founder and I were interested in entering the crypto market and starting our first fiat exchange platform for Central and Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, our endeavors were halted abruptly by the fact that our digital safety fell victim to fraudsters who quickly found a way to crawl through inadequate security measures. Needless to say, there were no viable security measures or alternative software solutions to secure our crypto platform.
Thus came the idea that if something doesn’t work, if you want to get something right, you have to do it yourself. The success of SEON’s solution was thanks to effectively securing certain digital assets from fraudsters and expanding it into a viable business. This is what led us to create SEON Technologies and channel its growth to this very day.
Tell us about the technology behind the product
Our software combines open data from digital and social media, phone, email, IP, and device lookups in real-time to help uncover as much data as possible. Machine learning adapts to how different businesses evaluate risk and can manually set up certain paradigms to filter out suspicious user activities.
What do you find most interesting about the way that hackers operate?
What’s really interesting to see is that a majority of scammers, fraudsters, and hackers use similar methods to get hold of their victim’s private data or trust. Email phishing and pharming are the most common types of fraud, for example, in the US.
However, it has come to our attention that there are new forms of fraud on the rise; like synthetic identities or SIM swapping attacks. For this reason, we try to implement new machine learning algorithms to help risk operations fight these new forms of fraud.
One example of rapid hacker attacks can be found in the eCommerce industry, mainly in platforms like Shopify. For this reason, we’ve developed our Shopify app fraud system that helps eCommerce companies fight the risk of having stolen card details, account takeovers (ATO), and the ever-dreaded issue of chargebacks.
Why are early adopters choosing SEON over other offerings on the market?
We offer a wide range of commercial benefits like social signals combined with digital footprint data detection and fraudulent prevention transactions. Our AI and machine learning algorithms help adapt to how different businesses evaluate risk. Combined with these perks, we aim to provide a frictionless user experience.
How fast are you growing?
To put it into perspective, this year alone we have hired around 100 new employees and opened up two offices in the US and Indonesia. This is all thanks to our series A investment round that helped channel this rapid growth.
What business advice can you share with other leaders?
Do not refrain from failure. Finding a serious problem in our crypto exchange had led us to develop a business that continues to be hugely impactful for many other businesses. If we had obstinately stuck with the crypto exchange and not been willing to adapt, then we definitely would not be as successful as we are today. Learn from failures, embrace them and adapt to changes.
What do you think that cyber security will look like 10 years from now?
Based on what we know so far, it is most likely that fraud will be here and it will be on the rise. As a result of Covid-19, we’ve experienced staggering numbers of fraud cases and this will most likely continue as companies continue to go digital, seeing perpetual benefits in the online world. We are also aware that new forms of fraud and cyber crime activities will take place, and we’ll have to keep an eye out for these.
Whatever the case, we will be here to stay and fight fraud.
Lastly, to learn more about pressing issues in the cyber world, please join us at the premiere cyber security event of the year – CPX 360 2022. Register here.
