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10/06/2026 10:41 pm
TL;DR: Delivery platforms are facing coupon abuse, refund fraud, merchant laundering, and SMS verification scams as fraud tactics spread through social media tutorials, according to SumSub. The real governance problem is that growth models built for frictionless checkout now depend on identity and transaction controls that can absorb abuse without punishing legitimate users.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SumSub: fraud in on-demand delivery platforms and the changing abuse landscape
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should delivery platforms reduce fraud without hurting customer conversion?
A: They should use risk-tiered friction rather than blanket challenge.
Q: Why do delivery apps attract so much fraud?
A: Delivery apps combine fast onboarding, repeat transactions, coupon mechanics, refunds, and merchant relationships in one environment.
Q: What do teams get wrong about AI-based fraud detection?
A: They often assume the model itself is the control.
Practitioner guidance
- Map fraud touchpoints across the full delivery journey Inventory where abuse can occur at signup, coupon use, refund requests, merchant onboarding, and verification.
- Set friction thresholds by risk tier Define different verification rules for low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk transactions.
- Correlate abuse signals across systems Combine customer identity data, device intelligence, payment history, and merchant behaviour into one review path.
What's in the full article
SumSub's full research covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A full conversation on how Glovo calibrates acceptable friction across different markets and customer flows.
- More detail on AI and machine learning usage for real-time fraud detection in delivery environments.
- The specific fraud patterns discussed in the episode, including coupon abuse, merchant money laundering, and SMS verification scams.
- The interview context around how platform operators think about balancing customer experience with abuse resistance.
👉 Read SumSub's episode on fraud patterns in on-demand delivery →
On-demand delivery fraud: where is the governance gap?
Explore further
11/06/2026 2:49 am
Fraud in delivery platforms is a governance problem, not just an abuse problem. The article shows how opportunistic users, organised fraudsters, and merchant abuse all target the same friction points in the customer lifecycle. That puts identity verification, payment trust, and exception handling into one operational control plane, which many teams still manage separately. Practitioners should treat fraud as a trust orchestration issue across the full order path.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Organisations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, creating fragmentation that undermines centralised control, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own fraud governance in a delivery platform?
A: Fraud governance should sit across security, product, payments, and operations because the abuse surface spans identity, transaction logic, and fulfilment. If one team owns only part of the journey, the platform usually ends up with gaps between detection, investigation, and customer experience.
👉 Read our full editorial: Delivery app fraud shows the cost of frictionless growth
