Case Study: Zoosk virtually eliminates romance scams and protects APIs with Cequence Security

Zoosk - Customer Case Study

Zoosk, a global online dating app, faced persistent romance fraud from automated attacks—primarily account takeovers and fake account creation—where scams averaged about $12,000 per incident and damaged user trust and brand reputation. To stop these API- and mobile-targeted attacks (roughly 90% targeted their mobile APIs) without slowing development, Zoosk turned to Cequence Security and its Cequence Application Security Platform with Bot Defense.

Cequence Security deployed Bot Defense (including the CQAI analytics engine) out of band as an NGINX plugin in Zoosk’s AWS environment to discover and analyze web, mobile, and API traffic using 150+ ML-based automation indicators, blocking malicious automation inline. The result: Cequence Security has virtually eliminated romance scams tied to automated account takeover and fake-account attacks, lowered infrastructure and fraudulent-transaction costs, preserved Zoosk’s development velocity (secure biweekly updates), and restored user confidence and brand protection.

Zoosk

Conor Callahan

Technical Lead of Platform and Infrastructure