What is a Duplicate Account? How Does Business Detect and Prevent It?

There are many platforms where users can create multiple accounts. It makes it difficult to monitor users' activities. Many users use it positively, and there are many accounts that use it for negative purposes, such as referral, promo abuse, and financial fraud. Both detection and prevention are essential for platforms. Here, in this guide, you will learn about duplicate accounts and prevention tips, and detection solutions.

What is a Duplicate Account?

A duplicate account is an additional account a user creates through identical, similar, or linked information, such as email address, phone number, device, or identity document.

These accounts are not always fraudulent. In some cases, users create multiple accounts to separate personal and business purposes or after losing access to an existing account.

Duplicate fraudulent accounts are created to abuse promotions, bypass platform restrictions, manipulate reviews or votes, commit payment fraud, or evade compliance checks.

Why do Users Create Duplicate Accounts?

Users create duplicate accounts for various purposes, such as:

Promotion and Bonus Abuse: It involves claiming referral rewards, welcome bonuses, discounts, and cashback offers multiple times through multiple accounts.

Ban Evasion: Fraudsters create new accounts after suspension or use additional accounts to bypass platform restrictions and limits.

Resource Exploitation: User uses multiple free trials, extra storage, free credits, or other resources made for single-time use for new users.

Fraud and Financial Crimes: Fraudsters may use this account for money laundering, synthetic identity fraud, account takeover fraud, and other forms of financial fraud.

How to Detect a Duplicate Account?

There are many methods that a platform or a business can use to detect such accounts:

Verifying Direct Identifiers: Cross-checking exact matches across records for email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses.

Biometric Verification: Integrating biometric verification also helps prevent these accounts, as the user's photo is matched against the existing database.

Device Intelligence: Checking hardware configurations, operating systems, screen resolutions, and browser plugins to find multiple accounts created from the same device.

IP and Network Tracking: Flagging multiple accounts sharing the same IP address. It helps in finding the mask IP addresses or using VPN and proxies.

Best Practices for Preventing Duplicate Accounts

You should use various methods of authentication to prevent these kind of accounts:

Use Multi-Factor Verification

Relying on a single verification method is insufficient to stop duplicate account creation. Businesses should use multiple verification layers during onboarding and account management.

Common verification methods include:

Email Verification

Phone number verification (OTP)

Government ID Verification

Address verification

Selfie Verification

Implement Device Intelligence

It helps you verify users based on the characteristics of the device they use to access your platform. Device intelligence is considered one of the best methods to find users who try to create multiple accounts.

Monitor Behavioural Signals

Behaviour analytics helps in finding suspicious patterns with duplicate accounts. Some unusual pattern examples are rapid account creation attempts, similar browsing patterns, and abnormal referral activity.

Use Biometric Verification

Biometric verification adds an extra layer of identity verification. Common biometric methods include facial recognition, selfie matching, liveness detection, and voice verification. It helps businesses identify the user during the registration process.

Conduct Continuous Risk Monitoring

Duplicate account detection should not stop after registration. Fraudsters often create accounts that appear legitimate at the beginning. After that, they use this account for conducting suspicious activities.

DeepID for Duplicate Account Detection

DeepID is a mobile security and device intelligence platform. It binds the user identity with the device and uses various verification points to find a suspicious user. It continuously monitors the user and provides risk signals. With DeepID, you can easily identify payment fraud, account takeover, SMS fraud, Bot detection, fake accounts, and promo abuse.

This all-in-one SDK prevents account sharing, fake clicks, and detects the use of emulators, device farms, and much more. Businesses can rely on DeepID for duplicate account detection.

Conclusion

Duplicate accounts are a concern for businesses because fraudsters use them for both legit and illegal purposes. Businesses can detect these accounts with device intelligence, IP network tracing, biometric verification, and other verification methods. Apart from this, we know prevention is better cure. By using multi-factor authentication, device intelligence solutions, and behaviour pattern analysis, businesses can avoid fraud.

FAQs

Ques: What are duplicate accounts?

Ans: It refers to the creation of multiple accounts created by the same users using the same information.

Ques: Why is duplicate account detection important for businesses?

Ans: It is important because it prevents fraud, promotional abuse, compliance violations, and inaccurate business data.

Ques: How to detect duplicate accounts?

Ans: You can detect accounts through various methods like device intelligence, biometric verification, identity verification, etc.

Ques: Can biometric verification prevent duplicate accounts?

Ans: Yes, it helps in identifying users creating multiple accounts using different identities.

Ques: What is the difference between a duplicate account and a fake account?

Ans: A duplicate account is an additional account of an existing user, where a fake account is created using fake or someone else's information.