It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the deep and dark connection between big money and big fraud. One need only look at black markets for drugs and other controlled and/or precious commodities. But what about cases where the commodity is soft, intangible, and practically virtual? I am talking about loyalty and rewards programs.

A study by Colloquy (in 2011) estimated that the loyalty and rewards programs in the U.S. alone had an estimated outstanding value of $48 billion US dollars. This is “outstanding” value because it doesn’t carry tangible benefit until the rewards or loyalty points are cashed in, redeemed, or otherwise exchanged for something that you can “take to the bank”. In anybody’s book, $48 billion is really big value — i.e., big money rewards for loyal customers, and a big target for criminals seeking to defraud the rightful beneficiaries of these rewards.

The risk vs. reward equation in loyalty programs now has huge numbers on both sides of that equation. There’s great value for customers. There’s great return on investment for businesses seeking loyal customers. And that’s great bait to lure criminals into the game.

In the modern digital marketplace, it is now possible to manipulate payment systems on a larger scale, thereby defrauding the business of thousands of dollars in rewards points. The scale of the fraud could match the scale of the entire loyalty program for some firms, which would therefore bankrupt their supply of rewards for their loyal and faithful customers. This is a really big problem waiting to happen unless something is done about it.

The something that can be done about it is to take advantage of the fast predictive modeling capabilities for fraud detection that are enabled by access to more data (big data), better technology (analytics tools), and more insightful predictive and prescriptive algorithms (data science).

Fraud analytics is no silver bullet. It won’t rid the world of fraudsters and other criminals. But at least fast automatic modeling will give firms better defenses, more timely alerts, and faster response capabilities. This is essential because, in the digital era, it is not only business that is moving at the speed of light, but so also are the business disruptors.

Some simple use cases for fraud analytics within the context of customer loyalty reward programs can be found in the article “Where There’s Big Money, There’s Big Fraud (Analytics)“.

Payment fraud reaches across a vast array of industries: insurance (of all kinds), underwriting, social programs, purchasing and procurement, and now loyalty and rewards programs. Be prepared. Check out the analytics solutions from the fast automatic modeling folks at http://soft10ware.com/.

Follow Kirk Borne on Twitter @KirkDBorne