Your IP address acts as your digital fingerprint online, and it plays an important role in how email providers, websites and security systems assess your trustworthiness. If your IP gets a bad reputation, you may find your emails landing in spam folders or your access to certain services blocked, and this can lead to missed opportunities, revenue and brand damage.

To reduce risk, check IP address for fraud risk for fraud risk regularly. This will help prevent fake traffic from skewing your analytics and impacting business decisions. For example, a sudden increase in login attempts from an unknown country or region can be a red flag for fraudulent activity such as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack or spoofing — which involves falsifying the origin of data packets to trick systems into believing they’re coming from a trusted source.

How to Check an IP Address for Fraud Risk

One popular way to check IP addresses for fraud risk is by using an IP quality score tool, which gives you a quick indication of the likelihood of fraudulent or suspicious behavior. While many of these tools are based on crowdsourced information, the best ones combine this with other key indicators such as the ISP, usage type and city to offer the most robust fraud prevention.

Using this kind of tool in combination with other IP intelligence can help identify more complex patterns of activity that are difficult to detect by human analysts. For instance, when an unexpected pattern of cross-border logins was detected by a company, their risk team used the IP quality score tool to quickly determine that this activity was highly suspicious and likely related to fraud.