Three Sigma
Three Sigma is The Outlier Lab's vetted community where transaction fraud practitioners share sanitized cases, solve problems together and trade defensive techniques.
The name comes from the normal distribution, where almost everything sits within three standard deviations of the mean. Fraud lives out past three sigma, among the outliers, and the people in this community spend their careers looking there.
Why it exists
Fraud spreads across companies faster than defenses do. When a new receipt-editing technique, a fresh wave of brokerage takeovers or a referral ring moves from one app to the next, the second company to see it usually has no idea the first one already did. Three Sigma is a place to close that gap, practitioner to practitioner, without exposing customers, employers or detection logic to the people we're defending against.
What members get
| Playbooks | Detection logic, rule patterns, illustrative thresholds, review checklists, QA rubrics and response runbooks for each major mechanism |
| Shared cases | Sanitized write-ups of patterns members are seeing, in a common format, tagged by mechanism, industry and rail |
| Emerging-pattern alerts | Early heads-ups when a new MO starts moving across companies |
| Problem-solving threads | "Has anyone seen…?" and "How did you handle…?" with peers who have |
| Templates | Launch reviews, QA forms, case documentation and incident templates |
Who it's for
People who defend customers or platforms from transaction fraud: fraud strategy, operations, analytics, investigations and QA; fraud data scientists and risk engineers; trust & safety, AML and financial crimes professionals; and the product and support leaders who own fraud-exposed flows, at brokerages, banks and neobanks, payments companies, marketplaces, cashback and coupon apps, and retailers.
How it works
- Vetted membership. Every applicant is reviewed by a person. See Access Model.
- Sanitized sharing. Cases are sanitized before posting: no customer data, nothing confidential to your employer, nothing that would help an attacker. Every post carries a Traffic Light Protocol label that says how far it may travel.
- Defenders' rules. Discussion stays on defending against fraud. No vendor pitching, no competitively sensitive business talk, no recruiting of attackers' services "for research".
- Free. There's no paywall, ever; the community runs on what members contribute.
Apply
Tell us where you work and what you hope to get from the community.
Related
- Access Model
- Responsible Publication Policy
- About The Outlier Lab
- Mission and Principles