How to Find Social Media Accounts By Email Address Only

And this is the key point: an email address is linked to several, if not dozens of online accounts — including, of course, social media.

Yes, it’s possible to find social media information based on an email address only. The main note, however, is that it’s easier to find social media info — not necessarily the account itself. That means a first and last name, and in some cases a profile picture. It’s a process known as social media analysis, often offered with a reverse email lookup tool.

Tools can, therefore, aggregate that social data and filter through it. You may find data such as:

Yes, as long as the data you seek is in public, open source databases. This is particularly important if you are in Europe and need to remain compliant with the GDPR. Our solution, for instance, is fully GDPR compliant.

With fraudsters, this is especially challenging, as they will often try to create accounts based on a real person’s stolen data. These synthetic IDs, made of real data but not created by real people, need to be filtered out for social media profiling to be efficient.

As we’ll see below, there is a high success rate of fraud detection using social data. While it’s easy to create email addresses with names that match a stolen credit card, it takes more work to do it for social media profiles.

When no social media data exists, we can assume that the customer is riskier. We can use social media to reveal a case of ID theft, if the social media data doesn’t match anything else from the alleged user.

At SEON, we use social media profiling as part of our Email and Phone Analysis APIs. The former, for instance, performs a reverse email check so you can enrich data based on an email address only. It’s highly efficient because it flags fraudsters before they can even register to your website at the onboarding stage. It also has the advantage of working with very few data points, which means a better user experience for legitimate customers.

You can integrate the Email API directly into your online platform, or use our Intelligence Chrome plugin to manually check email addresses.

SEON will look for registration data, and let you know if the person used the same email address on social media. Moreover, any email addresses created simply for fraudulent purposes will automatically be filtered out, which already improves security for the least sophisticated attacks.

Just checking if a social media account is connected can help you flag fraudsters. In fact, according to our own data, 76% of online loan customers who didn’t have social media data would not pay them back.

The immediate benefit is in calculating your risk score based on social media presence. If the risk is high, you can add more security steps. If the risk is low, you can safely onboard new users.

Once you have validated the person’s social media profile accounts, you can manually look for more information, for instance using their profile name and by browsing through their public pictures.

Aside from preventing fraudsters from entering your business, you can also use social media analysis to catch them in the act of lying to you. This is precisely how one of our clients uses SEON Intelligence, both for onboarding and for debt collection.

A renowned online loan company, they found that social media profiling is a great advantage when questioning customers, to know if they’re dealing with the right person, or a fraudster who hasn’t done their research.

Finally, manually accessing social data can be the ideal way to decline chargeback requests. Believe it or not, some fraudsters will show off their purchases on social media, which can be used as proof in a chargeback dispute.

You can get to know a lot more about your users, remove doubts when dealing with little data, and even legally protect yourself against chargebacks and defaulting customers.

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