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Fake accounts, bot signups, and fraudulent users cost online businesses millions each year. Fraudsters often exploit free email providers, disposable domains, or stolen credentials to create accounts that bypass basic checks. Without stronger intelligence at the point of signup, organizations face increased risk of spam, fraud, and abuse.
With the Descope Elephant Trust Connector, teams can add advanced domain intelligence and identity trust scoring directly into their customer signup flows. This enables businesses to block disposable or personal email addresses when only commercial domains are allowed, and to make real-time trust decisions based on an applicant’s digital footprint.
About Elephant Trust
Elephant Trust is the global identity-trust solution that helps payment platforms, e-commerce, marketplaces, and more approve real customers and cut fraud across the user journey. Powered by 5 billion identities, Elephant delivers real-time trust scores and rich identity intelligence, connecting signals across email, phone, IP, and address, so you can recognize trusted users quickly and block synthetic, fake, low-quality, and suspicious users.
Connector overview
The Descope + Elephant Trust connector gives developers two main trust-enhancing actions inside identity flows:
Elephant Trust API: Receive a trust score or decision for a user based on Elephant’s analysis, helping detect fraudulent or high-risk signups instantly.
Elephant / Email Domain Type Check: Identify whether an email address belongs to a commercial, free, or disposable domain. Useful for ensuring only business domains are accepted during B2B signups.
These actions can be dropped into Descope’s no-code workflow builder and combined with data from other risk identification tools such as Telesign, AbuseIPDB, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise for multi-layered signup security.
Use Case: Identify and mitigate risky signups
Fraudsters frequently create new accounts with stolen or fake information. According to a study by SpyCloud, 9% of all new accounts in 2023 were fraudulent, showing how often attackers slip through weak signup checks.
Elephant’s Trust API solves this by scoring a user’s trustworthiness in real time. High-trust users sign up seamlessly, while risky signups can be challenged, flagged, or blocked, reducing fraud without adding friction for genuine customers.
Here’s how it works in a Descope Flow:
A user submits their signup form.
Descope calls Elephant Trust API to retrieve a trust score or risk classification.
If the score indicates a high-trust user, the signup proceeds seamlessly.
If the score is low or indicates risk, the flow can:
Trigger step-up verification (e.g., OTP, document check)
Flag the signup for review
Block the account creation outright
This allows organizations to filter out malicious actors and automated signups without impacting legitimate users.
Check out the Elephant identity trust decision Flow Template, available directly in the Descope Console.
Use Case: Verify email domains during signup
In B2B environments, the quality of a signup matters as much as the quantity. When anyone can register with a free or disposable email address, businesses often see an influx of spam accounts, duplicate profiles, and low-value leads that waste sales and support resources. This is projected to cost businesses up to $23 billion in the U.S. alone by 2030.
By adding Elephant’s Email Domain Type Check at signup, organizations can instantly determine whether an email belongs to a commercial, free, or disposable domain. This ensures that only legitimate business users are onboarded while filtering out accounts that don’t meet your trust requirements.
Below is a step-by-step example of what this flow would look like:
A user attempts to sign up with their email address.
Descope calls Elephant / Email Domain Type Check to determine if the domain is commercial, free, or disposable.
If the domain is commercial, signup proceeds as normal.
If it’s a personal email address or a high-risk disposable domain, the flow can:
Block the signup entirely
Prompt the user to use a business email address
Flag the signup for manual review
Any other chosen mitigation action
This approach is ideal for B2B SaaS platforms, partner portals, or any service that requires professional credentials to join.
Get started today by using the Elephant email domain type check Flow Template, available directly in the Descope Console.
Conclusion
The Descope Elephant Trust connector brings intelligence to every signup decision, reducing fraud, improving user quality, and protecting platform integrity. By verifying email domain types and applying identity trust scoring at the moment of account creation, businesses can stop fake accounts before they start.
Interested to learn more about the connector? Check out our docs. If you haven’t yet started your Descope journey, sign up for a Free Forever account and set up your own Elephant Trust connector. To explore other connectors, visit our integrations page.
