Overview
Ibotta is a leading cashback rewards platform with millions of consumers (“Savers”) earning cash through everyday purchases. As the product surface expanded, so did the attack surface for fraud. To maintain trust and integrity, Ibotta embedded observability into its fraud detection systems.
Challenge
Fraud prevention at Ibotta demanded speed. As Jaylyn Stoesz explained, “For fraud prevention teams, the window for detecting and stopping fraud has shrunk to sub-seconds.” Fraudsters were exploiting any delay in detection, yet Ibotta’s existing systems struggled to keep up. Billions of daily events required real-time processing, but legacy pipelines often locked data for hours, leaving analysts blind when they needed visibility most. Data lived in silos across internal systems and vendor feeds, and the few tools available required deep technical expertise — limiting fraud response to a small group of specialists.
Solution
“Imply, built on top of Druid, made real-time fraud analytics much more accessible for our fraud operations and analyst teams.”
— Jaylyn Stoesz, Ibotta
To stay ahead of evolving threats, Ibotta built a real-time fraud observability platform on Imply. By unifying data ingestion from internal systems and third-party vendors, analysts gained a complete, timely view of fraud activity. Subsecond analysis let them drill into billions of events in milliseconds, while a self-service GUI made investigations accessible to dozens more team members. Instead of waiting on delayed pipelines, fraud teams could respond in real time, triggering automated alerts and rollbacks before incidents spread.
Results
- Speed — Detection and response reduced from hours to minutes, often with sub-second awareness
- Scale — Billions of records processed daily across vendor and internal data
- Accessibility — 30× more users empowered with self-service fraud analytics
- Efficiency — 25% reduction in infrastructure costs while expanding fraud prevention reach
“Reducing the interval between fraud incident awareness and mitigation is crucial to our business.”
— Jaylyn Stoesz, Ibotta
Why It Matters
Fraud is both a financial and trust risk. With real-time observability, Ibotta safeguards millions of Savers and brand partners while giving teams the freedom to innovate instead of firefighting. Faster detection cycles not only stop losses but also strengthen the trust that underpins Ibotta’s platform.
Ibotta protects its platform and customers with real-time observability built on Imply. Our Observability Warehouse, Lumi, is powered by the same Druid query engine, giving fraud and security teams the speed, scale, and efficiency needed to stop threats in real time.
See how Imply Lumi can transform fraud detection and security analytics.