Head of Anti-Fraud / Verification
Head of Anti-Fraud / Verification leads the fight against fraud and the verification function. They protect traffic, users and payments from fraud, fake profiles and scams.
What a Head of Anti-Fraud / Verification does
The Head of Anti-Fraud / Verification ensures that the product and traffic are not used for fraud, including fake accounts, bots, scam conversations, payment abuse and low-quality traffic from partners. In high-risk verticals, and especially in dating, fraud hits revenue directly, damages brand reputation, strains relationships with payment providers and draws regulatory scrutiny. That is why the role is established as a separate leadership function.
The role sits at the intersection of risk, product, payments, affiliate and support. The Head usually reports to the Director of Risk or the CRO/COO and manages a team of analysts, verification and moderation specialists, and sometimes engineers who write rules and scoring models. Their decisions determine which users pass registration, which profiles appear in search, which affiliate sources are shut off and which payments are blocked.
The value of the role lies in balance. Strict filters protect the business but reduce conversion and scare off genuine users. The Head of Anti-Fraud builds processes, metrics and escalation paths so that fraud decreases without losing legitimate traffic, and so that decisions can be explained to partners, payment systems and internal teams.
Responsibilities
- Set the anti-fraud and verification strategy across the product, traffic and payments
- Manage the teams of anti-fraud analysts, verification and moderation specialists, and set their responsibilities and priorities
- Approve rules and scoring thresholds for registrations, activity and payments, and agree them with product and marketing
- Oversee photo and video verification, age checks and identity verification processes
- Lead investigations of major incidents such as waves of fake registrations, bot farms, and schemes involving subscriptions and chargebacks
- Manage work with affiliate partners: traffic quality checks, source blocking, clawbacks and penalties
- Work with payment providers and processors on chargebacks, disputed transactions and security requirements
- Respond to requests from regulators and internal compliance teams, and prepare reports on anti-fraud measures
- Build metrics and dashboards for fraud monitoring, and agree the budget for tools and contractors
- Set tasks for development on anti-fraud features such as deduplication, multi-account detection, behavioral analysis and user complaints
Skills
- Understanding of dating fraud schemes: fake profiles, romance scams, off-platform redirects, pig butchering
- Designing multi-layered checks: rules, scoring, manual moderation and identity verification
- Managing a team and prioritizing with limited resources and a growing volume of events
- Translating analytics into clear decisions for product, marketing and leadership
- Working with data: forming hypotheses, evaluating rule quality and controlling false positives
- Negotiating with partners, payment providers and verification contractors
- Knowledge of payment system requirements, KYC/AML practices and general approaches to personal data protection
- Crisis management: making fast decisions during an attack wave or a user-related scandal
- Writing regulations, instructions and standards for moderators and analysts
Tools
- SQL and BI systems (Metabase, Looker, Tableau) for data extracts and dashboards
- Rule and scoring management systems, either in-house or built into anti-fraud platforms
- Device fingerprinting and network signal analysis tools (IP, device, geolocation, proxies)
- Identity verification and photo check systems based on KYC and liveness detection providers
- Ticketing and task trackers (Jira, Yandex Tracker) for working with development and incidents
- Call center and user support: support ticketing system and content moderation tools
- Affiliate trackers and postbacks for reconciling partner traffic quality
- Spreadsheets and presentations for reporting to leadership and compliance
How performance is measured
- Share of fraud in registrations and paid actions, tracked weekly and monthly for reduction
- Share of fake and bot profiles in the active base and among paying users
- Rate of false positives in rules and the percentage of legitimate users caught in blocks
- Time to respond to an incident and time to eliminate the fraud source
- Chargeback and disputed transaction rate by partner and payment channel
- Share of traffic switched off for quality reasons and its impact on reported revenue
- Compliance with SLAs for manual verification and moderation
By vertical
Dating
In dating, the main fraud is linked to fake profiles, bots, romance scams and redirecting users to external platforms. The Head of Anti-Fraud is responsible for photo and identity verification, moderation of conversations, protection against fraudulent subscriptions, and the quality of registrations from affiliates, where volumes are often inflated by fake traffic.
Levels
Head of / Director
Head of / Director is responsible for the entire anti-fraud strategy of the company: budget, team, system architecture, relationships with payment partners and the regulator. Decisions at the head level concern the balance between protection and growth. This person is accountable for the final fraud losses and for how the company explains its measures to external parties.
How to get there
People usually move into this area from anti-fraud analytics, risk analytics, moderation or user verification. Useful background includes experience with data and rules, an understanding of the user journey, and the ability to handle incidents. For dating and other high-risk verticals, experience specifically in those verticals is important, because fraud schemes are specific to each niche.
To grow toward leadership, it is worth mastering SQL, basic statistics and rule quality evaluation, understanding the payment cycle and chargebacks, and studying KYC practices and personal data requirements. It is also important to gain management experience: first leading a small group of analysts, then taking responsibility for the function's metrics and budget.
Growth comes from expanding your sphere of influence: from managing processes for one type of fraud to strategy across all channels and products, and from handling incidents to building a prevention system. A visible path includes public case studies on fraud reduction, well-built processes, and clear reporting for leadership and partners.
Next steps: Director of Risk / Head of Risk, Head of Trust & Safety, Chief Risk Officer (CRO), Head of Fraud Prevention, Director of Platform Safety
FAQ
How is a Head of Anti-Fraud different from an anti-fraud analyst?
An analyst investigates specific cases, builds reports and proposes rules. The Head of Anti-Fraud is responsible for the whole system: strategy, team, budget, blocking decisions, and relationships with partners and the regulator. In practice, they are accountable for the final fraud losses and for the balance between protection and growth.
Do you need dating experience to get this position?
Experience specifically in dating helps a lot, because fraud schemes differ between niches. However, there are adjacent areas where the skills transfer: marketplaces, social networks, online platforms with user-generated content, and fintech. Understanding general principles of scoring, verification and incident handling matters more.
What determines income in this role?
Income usually depends on the size of the company and the volume of business the function protects, the complexity of the vertical and regulatory requirements, whether there is a dedicated team and budget, and experience in crisis management. For exact figures, it is best to check current job postings and market surveys.
How should an employer write a job posting for this position?
Describe which types of fraud and acquisition channels fall under the role, which team reports to it, and which tools are used. Specify requirements for management experience, data skills and high-risk verticals, as well as how the role interacts with product, payments and partners. Specifics reduce the flow of irrelevant applications.
What mistakes are most common in this role?
Common mistakes include rules that are too strict and filter out legitimate users, lowering conversion; no metrics for false positives; reacting to fraud without analyzing its source; and dependence on a single partner or a single payment channel. A good leader builds a system that learns from incidents and stays transparent to related teams.
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