Protecting Cash App Customers from Bitcoin Scams
Author
Block
Tags
Author
Block
Tags
At Block, we believe that bitcoin has the potential to become the “native currency” of the internet.” Its potential to improve upon traditional financial systems is immense, offering new opportunities for borderless transactions and financial freedom. One of our top priorities as we give our customers access to this new financial tool is to create technology that prioritizes user protection.
Block builds tech to make it safer for people to move money online. We recently introduced pop-up warnings for potential peer-to-peer payment scams in Cash App, and now we do the same for bitcoin transactions. As bitcoin scams have become more common, we’ve invested in educating our customers about using bitcoin safely. This is particularly important because the nature of blockchain technology makes transactions impossible to reverse.
We use a combination of signals provided by third-party providers that specialize in forensic bitcoin data, internal signals, and machine learning models to trigger warnings and blocks. If a customer sends or withdraws bitcoin that we believe may be related to a scam, we will warn the customer and provide scam-related education so that they can re-review the withdrawal and take a second look to make sure they know who they're sending to. When we have high confidence that a payment or withdrawal is related to a scam, we will block it up front.
Cash App machine learning models evaluate millions of transactions per month to detect and prevent scams. While suspected scams that are detected and prevented make up slightly less than one percent of all BTC withdrawals, our risk rules act on these cases with high precision, minimizing impact on legitimate transactions while keeping our customers safe.
An open protocol for money helps serve more people around the world faster. Keeping our customers safe is a major focus of this experience, from warning them about potential scams to giving them the option to keep their bitcoin secure with the Bitkey hardware wallet.
Author
Block
Tags
At Block, we believe that bitcoin has the potential to become the “native currency” of the internet.” Its potential to improve upon traditional financial systems is immense, offering new opportunities for borderless transactions and financial freedom. One of our top priorities as we give our customers access to this new financial tool is to create technology that prioritizes user protection.
Block builds tech to make it safer for people to move money online. We recently introduced pop-up warnings for potential peer-to-peer payment scams in Cash App, and now we do the same for bitcoin transactions. As bitcoin scams have become more common, we’ve invested in educating our customers about using bitcoin safely. This is particularly important because the nature of blockchain technology makes transactions impossible to reverse.
We use a combination of signals provided by third-party providers that specialize in forensic bitcoin data, internal signals, and machine learning models to trigger warnings and blocks. If a customer sends or withdraws bitcoin that we believe may be related to a scam, we will warn the customer and provide scam-related education so that they can re-review the withdrawal and take a second look to make sure they know who they're sending to. When we have high confidence that a payment or withdrawal is related to a scam, we will block it up front.
Cash App machine learning models evaluate millions of transactions per month to detect and prevent scams. While suspected scams that are detected and prevented make up slightly less than one percent of all BTC withdrawals, our risk rules act on these cases with high precision, minimizing impact on legitimate transactions while keeping our customers safe.
An open protocol for money helps serve more people around the world faster. Keeping our customers safe is a major focus of this experience, from warning them about potential scams to giving them the option to keep their bitcoin secure with the Bitkey hardware wallet.