UC Davis Research Leads To Credit Card Fraud-fighting App Company

Source: Sacramento Business Journal, Mark Anderson
Photo: Fintech company Bouncer offers fraud detection for app-based transactions. (GETTY IMAGES, DAVID JOYNER)

A University of California Davis professor is co-founder of Bouncer, whose technology identifies credit card fraud for app-based companies.

Bouncer’s technology allows apps to verify credit cards through a visual scan using the phone’s camera that takes less than a second.

Research underlying the technology was done by computer science professor Sam King at UC Davis.

“The research that went into this company started in 2017, and we officially incorporated in May 2019,” King said in an email.

Bouncer’s primary target customers are mobile apps that accept credit card payments and are struggling with waves of financial fraud.

Bouncer’s first product is Card Scan, a software development kit, or SDK, that allows app-based companies to scan and find fraudulent credit cards in transactions. It can also determine the veracity of photo IDs.

Bouncer raised some seed money and went through Mountain View-based startup accelerator Y Combinator last year. The accelerator invests $125,000 into the companies that get into its competitive program.

King is a co-founder and chief scientist of Bouncer, which had offices in Davis and San Francisco until the spring. The company, which has eight employees, has since gone fully remote, King said.

Card Scan captures an image of a credit card, and reads the data, for a secure payment. It also can detect fraudulent efforts like images of cards and fake cards, using an algorithm built with a database of millions of fraudulent credit card scans, according to the UC Davis news service. It automatically rejects anything it considers to be a fraud.

King is an associate professor of computer science.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2020/07/09/bouncer-uc-davis-credit-card-fraud-app