Anti-Fraud Manager
The Anti-Fraud Manager protects the product and business from fraud: fraud rules, detection of bots, multi-accounts and payment fraud, and traffic quality metrics.
What a Anti-Fraud Manager does
The Anti-Fraud Manager ensures that fraudsters do not gain access to the platform, the company's money or real users. In dating, this means fake profiles, bots, romance scams that extract money, account takeovers and collusion with unscrupulous partners who buy traffic disguised as real people. The role combines analytics, rule management and team or process management, so it is often confused with an anti-fraud analyst or a moderation specialist.
Companies in high-risk verticals create this role because fraud directly hits revenue and reputation. Payment fraud leads to chargebacks and fines from payment providers, while fake activity erodes user trust and distorts metrics for ad networks. The Anti-Fraud Manager builds protection that does not drive away honest users with false blocks.
The role usually reports to the Head of Risk or Head of Trust & Safety and manages a team of anti-fraud analysts and moderators, often working with development and the payments function. The Anti-Fraud Manager sets priorities, aligns rules with product and support, and reports on fraud losses.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain the anti-fraud strategy: which threats to address first, which signals to use and where manual review is needed
- Maintain the library of fraud rules and scoring models: create, test and disable rules, and monitor their effectiveness
- Detect multi-accounts, fake profiles and bots using behavioral and technical signals (device, IP, activity patterns)
- Control payment fraud together with the finance and payments function: stolen cards, money laundering, payment splitting
- Investigate mass fraud and account takeover incidents, coordinate remediation and communication with affected users
- Assess partner traffic quality and initiate blocking or adjustment of payouts to unscrupulous sources
- Agree with product and support on rules that affect user experience and minimize false blocks
- Prepare regular reports for management on fraud losses, rule effectiveness and threat dynamics
- Manage the team of analysts and moderators: assign tasks, set procedures and calibrate decisions
- Work with external anti-fraud system vendors and payment partners on disputed cases
Skills
- Understanding of fraud types in dating and adjacent verticals: fake profiles, romance scams, money extraction, account takeover (ATO)
- Analytical thinking and data work: segmentation, anomaly detection, hypothesis testing
- Ability to write and test rules while understanding the cost of type I and type II errors
- Knowledge of payment mechanics and chargebacks, and experience working with payment providers
- Team management: procedures, KPIs, decision calibration, coaching
- Communication with product and engineering: explaining why protection is needed and agreeing on trade-offs
- Prioritization: separating mass threats from noise and deciding what to address now
- Understanding of user behavior and the ability to distinguish honest users from fraudsters using indirect signals
- Working with limited data and rapidly changing fraud schemes
Tools
- SQL and BI dashboards (Metabase, Looker Studio, Tableau)
- Anti-fraud systems and device fingerprinting services (selected and configured with vendors)
- Monitoring and logging systems (Kibana, Grafana)
- Internal moderation admin panels and user CRM
- Jira or Trello for tasks and incidents
- Google Analytics and MMP systems (for example, AppsFlyer) for traffic source analysis
- Spreadsheets and exports for manual case review (Google Sheets, Excel)
How performance is measured
- Share of fraud in registrations and activity (fake, bot and multi-account activity)
- Fraud losses in money and refunds as a share of total revenue
- Chargeback rate and share of disputed payments relative to payment provider requirements
- Share of false blocks confirmed by user complaints and appeals
- Incident response time and time to remediate consequences
- Partner traffic quality (share of rejected conversions, suspicious payouts)
- Rule effectiveness: trigger accuracy and coverage of known schemes
By vertical
Dating
In dating, the main threat involves fake profiles, romance scams and money extraction through messaging. The Anti-Fraud Manager works more with behavioral signals in chats, photo moderation and coordination with support than with payment fraud.
Levels
Management
At the management level, the role is responsible for the entire anti-fraud strategy and protection budget. It makes decisions on the trade-off between fraud losses and losing honest users, manages the team and reports to leadership on the financial impact of protection.
How to get there
People usually enter the profession from adjacent roles: moderation and user safety, anti-fraud analytics, risk analytics in fintech or gambling, or support with experience handling fraud. Most important is experience analyzing real fraud cases and explaining decisions with numbers.
What to study: types of fraud in online services, basic payment and chargeback mechanics, SQL and dashboards, principles of rule and scoring design, and the basics of process management. It is useful to understand how fake profiles and money extraction schemes work in dating.
Growth usually goes from analyst or senior specialist to department head: first you take ownership of your own incidents and rules, then the team, the strategy and collaboration with other departments. The visible result is lower losses while preserving user experience, which can be confirmed with data.
Next steps: Head of Risk, Head of Trust & Safety, Risk Director, Chief Security Officer (CSO)
FAQ
Who is an Anti-Fraud Manager in simple terms?
This is a specialist who protects a service from fraudsters: fake profiles, bots, multi-accounts and payment fraud. They set the rules, monitor how they perform and lead the team that investigates suspicious activity.
How is an Anti-Fraud Manager different from an anti-fraud analyst?
An analyst mainly researches data, finds schemes and proposes rules. The Anti-Fraud Manager is responsible for strategy, priorities, the protection budget and the team's results, and also aligns decisions with product, support and payment partners.
What skills are needed to become an Anti-Fraud Manager?
You need analytics and SQL, an understanding of user behavior and fraud schemes, knowledge of payments and chargebacks, and experience managing processes or a team. The ability to explain to leadership how much money protection saved and at what cost is highly valued.
What determines an Anti-Fraud Manager's income?
Income depends on the scale of the product, traffic and payment volume, the level of responsibility, and whether team management is part of the role. Market maturity also matters: in more regulated and larger verticals, protection requirements are higher.
Why does dating need a dedicated anti-fraud role?
Because fraudsters there work through trust and messaging, not only through payments. Fake profiles and romance scams directly damage user experience and reputation, so protection requires a dedicated focus on behavior and moderation.
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