About Chegg

Chegg is an American education technology company that helps students succeed in school. It offers textbook rentals, homework help, tutoring, study guides, and career advice. Through its tools, Chegg makes learning easier and education more accessible."

The challenge

Account sharing a top business priority

From analyzing login attempts across devices and IP addresses, the company realized that many students were sharing their account credentials with friends and classmates and even selling accounts online. Account sharing prevention became a top priority in 2020 to stop this fraudulent behavior and recoup lost revenue from shared accounts.

Technical challenges to accurate detection

The company found that detecting account sharing was a significant technical challenge that would require a more accurate identifier than using cookies or IP addresses alone.

Students using the platform often had:

• Shared IP addresses (on university campuses or residences)
• Multiple devices to access accounts (phone, tablet, laptop, and library computers)
• VPNs, Adblockers, or clearing cookies

The customer began building software in-house to prevent account sharing, but it was not accurate enough to catch many shared accounts and risked disturbing too many legitimate users

The company did not want to build the in-house expertise needed to generate identifiers with sufficiently high accuracy, and instead wanted a provider like Fingerprint that specialized in visitor identification.

Why Fingerprint

From their investigation, the company found that the Fingerprint API provided the most accurate solution out of all the alternatives they considered for account sharing prevention.

Higher accuracy vs. cookies, IP addresses, and other device identification services

Fingerprint is the most accurate browser fingerprinting service available today, with up industry-leadinhg visitor identification accuracy. Instead of relying solely on cookies or IP addresses to flag users that are sharing an account, Fingerprint combines an array of 100+ unique signals that can identify users even when VPNs, incognito browsing or other spoofing techniques are used.

The company also compared Fingerprint to a competing device identification service and found that the Fingerprint API caught many additional account sharing instances with a much lower rate of false positives.

Future-proofed account sharing prevention

To ensure that their solution was effective for years to come, the company found it valuable to partner with a team committed to cutting edge identification. As users change their behaviors, browsers change their privacy settings, the Fingerprint API is regularly updated to provide consistently high accuracy.

GDPR and CCPA compliant

Due to the company's philosophy of putting its customers first, it was essential to maintain users' rights to online privacy. Fingerprint is compliant with GDPR and CCPA for fraud detection. All customers of Fingerprint can choose between US and EU hosted data centers to comply with their specific data localization and residency requirements.

Key takeaways

By implementing Fingerprint, Chegg achieved a highly accurate and reliable solution to prevent account sharing without disrupting legitimate users. Fingerprint's advanced identification technology allowed Chegg to recapture lost revenue from shared accounts, future-proof their fraud prevention efforts, and maintain compliance with privacy regulations. This partnership enabled Chegg to focus on delivering a secure, user-friendly platform that supports students' academic success.