Topic starter
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.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by SumSub: “Glovo's Fraud Playbook: From Free Lunches to Money Laundering”.
Key questions
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 coupon and refund controls fail in on-demand delivery apps?
A: They fail when the platform treats promotional and refund logic as simple transaction rules instead of identity and behaviour signals.
Q: What are the signs that delivery fraud is spreading through a platform?
A: Common signs include repeated abuse of the same promotion patterns, abnormal refund clustering, merchant accounts with inconsistent payout behaviour, and fraud tactics appearing in multiple markets at once.
Practitioner guidance
- Model fraud by journey stage Break the delivery flow into customer acquisition, checkout, coupon use, refund, merchant onboarding, and payout stages, then map the fraud patterns that appear at each stage.
- Tighten identity checks at high-abuse points Apply stronger verification where abuse yields immediate value, especially at coupon issuance, refund approval, and merchant enrolment.
- Monitor social-channel fraud patterns Track tutorial-driven abuse tactics from public platforms and feed them into detection rules before they become common playbooks.
Bottom line: Delivery fraud in on-demand apps is a governance problem as much as a loss problem, because low-friction growth expands the number of places abuse can hide.
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This topic was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group
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
12/06/2026 4:23 am
Frictionless growth creates an identity governance debt: delivery platforms that optimise for conversion are implicitly accepting more trust at the point of order, refund, and merchant onboarding. That debt is not abstract. It shows up when the platform must decide whether convenience or abuse resistance defines the user experience. The practitioner conclusion is that abuse tolerance has to be designed, not discovered after losses appear.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Nearly 60% of companies reported that fraud losses were still increasing in 2025.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do identity and fraud teams share accountability for delivery-platform abuse?
A: Identity teams own assurance at onboarding, recovery, and merchant access points, while fraud teams own detection and response across the transaction flow. The governance gap appears when those responsibilities are separated, because abuse then moves into the handoff between identity verification and transaction approval.
👉 Read our full editorial: Delivery app fraud shows the cost of frictionless growth
This post was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group