Fraud Prevention with Pete Hunt

When Facebook acquired Instagram, one of the first systems Instagram plugged into was Facebook’s internal spam and fraud prevention system. Pete Hunt was the first Facebook engineer to join the Instagram team. When he joined, the big problems at Instagram were around fake accounts, harassment, and large volumes of spammy comments.

After seeing the internal Facebook spam prevention tools clean up Instagram, Pete decided to start a company to build products that would allow this type of spam and fraud prevention as a service.

Smyte provides protection against bad actors on the Internet. Complex marketplaces like Tilt, Meetup, and TaskRabbit plug into Smyte to filter their transactions for suspicious behavior. In this episode, we talk about how this type of behavior manifests, and the event-driven software architecture that the team at Smyte has built.

Software Daily

Software Daily

 
Subscribe to Software Daily, a curated newsletter featuring the best and newest from the software engineering community.