There is no need for a fun title when Address Jigging sounds so funny and is a real thing! And I know it sounds funny because when I talk about it, people laugh at me (you know who you are).
Address jigging is a clever technique for committing fraud that involves subtly modifying your ecommerce shipping address to make it appear different for each purchase. It's a trend that was started by sneakerheads (yes, another real word, this time for people who define themselves through their sneakers) who are often prevented from buying multiple pairs on launch day – so they found a workaround that allows them to buy one for themselves and one for resale. Address jigging has matured into numerous sophisticated techniques to obtain huge quantities of free samples of drugs, mobile phones and many other valuable items our clients have told us about. In fact, Jigging is often performed now by sophisticated bots and the scale of the fraud has become quite staggering.
Simple jigging techniques include creating a fictitious apartment at your house, or more likely, hundreds of fictious apartments. You can add random characters before your house number. You can even use legitimate alternates like "APT", "Apartment" and "Unit" or abbreviated street names. Or simply changing the order of address elements.
The technique works because many companies simply don't process addresses very well. They either use old-fashioned or unsophisticated software, and this leads them to performing post-shipment analytical gymnastics in an attempt to identify potential fraud.
The best way to combat address jigging is to use a unique and persistent identifier for the real address. The 'jiggee' (that is a made-up word) may decides to keep the jigged information on the address for legitimate delivery purposes, but that will not prevent the unique ID ensuring data integrity runs through the end-to-end addressing process.
When we designed the PreciselyID, way back in 2015, this wasn't one of the use cases we had anticipated. However because PreciselyID has been adopted by so many important and demanding customers (you know who you are), we've been able to build a robust and reliable ecosystem of capability that to allows it to be trusted for this type of fraud prevention.
#AWM #AddressJigging #Sneakerheads #UniqueID #PreciselyID
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Mike Ashmore
Senior Director Product Management
Precisely Software Inc.
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