NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Herald NOW
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
  • Herald NOW
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Politics
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Herald NOW
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Business

Startup Spotrisk detects risky buyers online

Chris Keall
By Chris Keall
Technology Editor/Senior Business Writer·NZ Herald·
22 Nov, 2022 04:00 PM5 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Spotrisk cofounders Jordan Lewis and John Gregoriadis. Photo / File

Spotrisk cofounders Jordan Lewis and John Gregoriadis. Photo / File

“I used to work in bricks-and-mortar retail in the 1990s, and there were security dye packs that would explode if you tried to walk out with a pair of jeans,” says Spotrisk cofounder Jordan Lewis.

Lewis says the fraud detection tools used by most online retailers today are the equivalent of those exploding dye packs: expensive, primitive and in-your-face intrusive.

He and business partner John Gregoriadis founded a startup called Spotrisk last year, after a tidy payday associated with Vend’s sale (keep reading). They pitch their product as a cheap, seamless way to spot risky buyers, run a verification check and approve or block an online order.

Or as Lewis styles it, the software equivalent of the cheap and discreet security tags used by traditional retailers today.

Their software integrates with two of the largest online shopping platforms, Shopify and BigCommerce, and adopters include fashion label World, gaming PC outfit Playtech and Golf Warehouse.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Spotrisk looks for multiple online shopping behaviours that could indicate a risky buyer. For example, someone who orders multiple items from the same IP address (that is, the same device or location) and wants each shipped to a different address. Combined with other tell-tale signs, it could mean the buyer is using a fake or stolen ID, and a stolen credit card.

A recent study found a 16 per cent rise in online fraud during the pandemic.

More of us are online shopping, more of the time, and the shift to hybrid working has created security holes that make it easier for hackers to steal credit card numbers and other personal data.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

The Government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert NZ) has tracked a big rise in such phishing and fraud during the Covid outbreak - and at a time when hard-pressed retailers can least afford it.

Retailers aren’t usually aren’t alerted that an item was bought with a stolen credit card until after the order is shipped, which leaves them carrying the cost of the chargeback, facing a potential escalation in credit card fees, and even suspension of their payment facility altogether, Lewis says.

Discover more

Business

Auckland company raises $30m in fight against shoplifters' high-tech tricks

08 Dec 04:00 PM
Business

Disney+ the latest streamer to hike pricing

21 Nov 04:25 AM
Business

Report reveals our largest and fastest-growing tech exporters

18 Nov 04:28 AM
Business

Your face is your boarding pass: Air NZ goes biometric at LAX

16 Nov 04:22 AM

Spotrisk signed up several hundred customers to its software-as-a-service product, offered for free.

Now, on the back of the startup joining Shopifiy’s ecosystem (in April) and its BigCommerce integration (announced this week) and new verification features, the startup has introduced paid plans over the past few weeks, and embarked on a growth drive.

Spotrisk looks for activity that could indicate someone's shopping with a stolen credit card, such as the same IP address being used to place orders with different delivery information.
Spotrisk looks for activity that could indicate someone's shopping with a stolen credit card, such as the same IP address being used to place orders with different delivery information.

Pricing ranges from free (for up to 30 orders analysed per month) to US$25 per month (for up to 150 orders analysed) to US$99 per month (for up to 1000 orders).

Their target market is the sort of small to medium retailers who create online stores using Shopify and BigCommerce’s platforms, with their various pre-made tools.

Lewis began his career in traditional retail, with a retail area manager role at Calvin Klein followed by a retail and distribution role for Trelise Cooper, while Gregoriadis was a retail manager for Spark.

Both ended up joining point-of-sale software startup Vend - in Gregoriadis’ case, after Vend bought a startup he’d founded called Shopim.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
"Bad actors" can be permanently blocked. Users also get access to Spotrisk's blocked buyer network.
"Bad actors" can be permanently blocked. Users also get access to Spotrisk's blocked buyer network.

After several years at Vend, both joined Xero, where Gregoriadis rose to become head of engineering, and Lewis “growth hacking lead” before they left to co-found Spotrisk last year.

The Auckland-based Vend was sold to Canadian company Lightspeed for around $455 million in March last year.

Both Lewis and Gregoriadis held small parcels of Vend shares issued under the firm’s ESOP scheme - and while the Lightspeed buyout didn’t deliver the pair a payday on anything like the scale of Vend’s founders and early investors, it still delivered a tidy sum; enough for them to assemble a crew of developers and get Spotrisk to the market without the need to tap venture capital.

Image / 123rf
Image / 123rf

A third Vend and Xero alum, Nick Houldsworth, took a minority stake and serves as an adviser (Houldsworth was chief marketing officer at Vend, then later GM, ecosystem for Xero).

Although their roles are more high-tech these days, Lewis says some basic themes don’t change.

He remembers a training game from his bricks-and-mortar days, where you had to try to steal goods, or spot a “shoplifter”. “It’s not always the obvious thing you would spot. The longer you worked there, the better you got at it.”

He draws an analogy with Spotrisk’s machine learning capability today. Its platform is always adding new suspicious online behaviour and “social signals” to its list of possible fraud flags.

Today, the startup is still in the first weeks of commercialising its product. But its co-founders already have plans to expand beyond online retail to apply their approach to other industries.

Spotrisk's paid version includes up to five verification checks per month (on a US$25/month plan) or up to 20 verification checks per month (on a US$99/month plan).
Spotrisk's paid version includes up to five verification checks per month (on a US$25/month plan) or up to 20 verification checks per month (on a US$99/month plan).

Meanwhile, their existing product does want it says on the tin, according to Playtech owner and general manager Paul Kao

“We had a robust process for detecting fraud but some orders were still getting through, so adding an extra layer of security never hurts,” Kao says.

“Since installing Spotrisk, we have been able to automate the fraud checks we used to do manually, and by combining Spotrisk with our payment gateways protection we can quickly identify a fraudulent purchase and not ship it. Avoiding the time and headache just one fraudulent order causes chasing courier companies and dealing with chargebacks pays for itself.”

And World’s Benny Castles says, “We used to only rely on Shopify’s inbuilt fraud analysis to alert us to suspicious orders.

“At the end of the day, it was really left to me to investigate and decide if each order was genuine. We might get 300 orders in 24 hours during our sales period and we simply don’t have time to look at all of them.

“Before using Spotrisk, I really didn’t feel confident fulfilling those orders, but our focus had to be getting the product out of the door and to the customer.”


Save

    Share this article

    Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Latest from Business

Personal Finance

Regulator to crack down on bankers, advisers and lawyers amid uptick in mortgage fraud

25 Jun 01:07 AM
Technology

Xero to acquire US platform Melio in $4.1b deal

24 Jun 11:39 PM
New Zealand

'Under pressure': NZ farms face succession challenges

24 Jun 11:15 PM

Audi offers a sporty spin on city driving with the A3 Sportback and S3 Sportback

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Business

Xero to acquire US platform Melio in $4.1b deal

Xero to acquire US platform Melio in $4.1b deal

24 Jun 11:39 PM

Accounting software firm Xero plans to buy Melio for US$2.5b.

'Under pressure': NZ farms face succession challenges

'Under pressure': NZ farms face succession challenges

24 Jun 11:15 PM
How US trade policies are driving toy prices to record highs

How US trade policies are driving toy prices to record highs

24 Jun 11:07 PM
Premium
Richard Prebble: How history warns against the Greens' fiscal ambitions

Richard Prebble: How history warns against the Greens' fiscal ambitions

24 Jun 11:00 PM
Gold demand soars amid global turmoil
sponsored

Gold demand soars amid global turmoil

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP