Ghostbusting for Adobe: Fighting Fraud with AI/ML

UX Research / Product Strategy / AI-Driven Systems

Adobe faced critical security and revenue risks from sophisticated fraud (account sharing, trial abuse, bot evasion). My role focused on the UX and behavioral design strategy for "Phantom," a new platform engineered to mitigate systemic fraud and protect legitimate users.

Adobe faced critical security and revenue risks from sophisticated fraud (account sharing, trial abuse, bot evasion). My role focused on the UX and behavioral design strategy for "Phantom," a new platform engineered to mitigate systemic fraud and protect legitimate users.

Client:

Adobe

Role:

Product Designer

Year:

2024

  • Built it. Backed it. Here’s the full drop.

  • Built it. Backed it. Here’s the full drop.

Challenge

Fraud is invisible until it hits the bottom line. At Adobe, misuse was occurring in quiet, yet in costly ways! One user sharing an account with ten others, bots mass-creating fake trials, and suspicious spikes in activity. I was brought in to help build a Zero-Trust UX that identified and applied friction only to malicious intent, maintaining seamlessness everywhere else, not just to detect patterns, but to design a system that understood intent.

Approach

  • Defined the design framework that classified user intent to inform the calibrated security response.


  • Designed the control-center UX for Operations and Product teams, transforming complex data into a visual, decision-making tool for rapid intervention.


  • Developed the internal communication strategy (microsite) to secure essential cross-organizational buy-in for the new system's operational UX.

Results

📊 Dashboard adoption significantly reduced time-to-resolution.

🧠 AI logic turned into a reusable strategic UX framework

📣 Microsite built internal traction for systemwide buy-in

🔍 Uncovered ~1.6M+ shared accounts (~5M device-level opportunity)

Learnings

This project stretched my thinking beyond UX into systems, edge cases, and intent. It reminded me that when you're designing for trust, nuance matters, and the best tools are the ones that guide good decisions without oversimplifying human behavior.