If you're like many people, when you get your credit card statement you probably give it a quick skim. Going through all the charges line by line just takes too much time, so you hope for the best and trust in your card provider.
That's not the best idea, says Yaron Samid, CEO of the hot new Israeli startup BillGuard. But not to worry: BillGuard will do the scanning for you, looking for scams, bad billing practices, double charges and errors. Samid estimates that BillGuard finds at least one bad charge for one out of every five subscribers of the free service.
In the first two months of beta testing, BillGuard saved users more than $250,000 in refundable charges. That's a lot of cash to the consumer, and it usually comes direct from banks, which would rather honor a claim than get into a time-consuming dispute. With such benefits to both banks and consumers, it's little wonder that BillGuard has already raised $3 million.
The company won O'Reilly Media's 2011 Big-Data Startup of the Year and was a runner-up in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 Top Startup of the Year competition.
A people-powered movement
Credit card fraud is a crime netting some $7 billion a year for scammers. "10 million US cardholders get hit by some sort of fraud every year, but banks only catch 30 percent of it themselves," Samid tells ISRAEL21c.
After you sign up on the BillGuard website, the service scans your online credit card statement daily, looking for fraud from sources that the company has logged into its database from a wide variety of publicly available complaint boards, discussion groups and even Twitter posts.
Read more at Israel21C
