Overview Global travel marketplace Couchsurfing is a global marketplace, dedicated to connecting travelers around the world. Founded in 2004, Couchsurfing offers a social experience whether users wish to stay with locals, meet up with like-minded folks in their home cities, or host travelers with a place to stay. Couchsurfers can make connections via desktop site and mobile app, and make up a community of over 18 million people in more than 200,000 cities.

Challenge Acting proactively, not reactively, to fraudulent content and repeat offenders As a community, Couchsurfing operates on a currency of trust. Fake accounts and spammy content not only affect the experience for legitimate users of the platform, they might even involve phishing, malicious comments, or further risk when linked to offline schemes. To prevent this off-platform movement, Couchsurfing built in-house tools that were clunky, led to lots of manual review, and became outdated quickly. They needed a solution that could address a variety of bad content, malicious users, and returning users who were hiding their identity after being banned. Furthermore, there was no way to proactively improve safety for the community by preventing these bad users from creating fraudulent content. Couchsurfing needed to determine who the bad users were and ensure they couldn’t come back – even if disguised under a different name, email, IP address, or device. They required something that could help them proactively fight and prevent content abuse, fake accounts, and other forms of fraud on their platform.

Solution Greater efficiency thanks to automated content abuse detection The team looked at dozens of vendors of all types, ranging from member reputation systems to identity solutions. There were many solutions that had visually impressive tools, but lacked a robust fraud detection engine that delivered the results they needed. Sift not only provided a stellar user experience, but also best-in-class machine learning technology and platform infrastructure. Upon adopting Sift, the team’s efficiency greatly improved – they discovered thousands of spammy accounts, all previously hidden. Prior to integration, the team would have to manually go through an ever growing list of bad users daily, including accounts flagged by community reports. With Sift, at least 50-70% of actions are now automated, freeing the team to focus on other work including learning more about the behaviors of their good and bad users in the Sift dashboard. “We never realized this much content abuse existed on our platform. Not only did Sift help to reveal the underlying problem, it also enabled us to automate the process of addressing it rapidly. We can now do much, much more with the same people on board.” ——Florian Ehrbar, Trust and Safety Lead, Couchsurfing