Case Study: Southwest Airlines virtually eliminates online gift card fraud with Accertify

Accertify Helped Southwest Airlines to Quickly Eradicate Online Gift Card Fraud

Southwest Airlines, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, was facing a sharp rise in online gift card fraud as sales migrated online—more than 90% of gift cards were sold on southwest.com by 2012. Fraud spiked in 2011–2012, creating a risk of losing over $1 million a year and exposing a 24-hour vulnerability from a manual, daily-report process that let fraudsters buy and use cards before teams could react.

Southwest integrated its gift card feed into Accertify’s Interceptas platform and deployed real-time screening rules in under a month. Automation let the airline shut down fraud attempts immediately, virtually eliminating gift card fraud within five weeks, reducing the fraud-prevention team from 10 to 2 while preventing larger dollar losses, and contributing to a broader 50% reduction in attempted fraud, a 44% drop in manual reviews and 59% lower review labor costs.

Southwest Airlines

Brandon Adams

Manager of Ticketing Operations