Case Study: Patreon achieves 95% reduction in fraud losses with Sift

How Patreon helps creators connect safely

Patreon, a global crowdfunding platform that lets creators earn recurring or one‑time payments from fans, faced rapidly growing payment, account, and content fraud—mostly from stolen credit cards—leading to rising chargebacks and an overwhelmed manual review process. As a young company with no prior fraud prevention measures, preventing fraud before transactions completed was imperative to protect revenue and user experience.

Patreon built an in‑house Trust & Safety team and implemented Sift’s Score API and Console to automate workflows, block risky users/transactions at set thresholds, and investigate signals when deeper review is needed. The solution reduced fraud losses by 95%, kept fraud rates low as the community scaled, cut manual review workload, and improved the overall creator and patron experience.

Patreon

Rick Hiltbrunner