Fraud Prevention in India's Construction Sector

Company

Challenges

Building credibility and trust in a fragmented, informal construction industry with no profiles, work history, or reliable financial data for workers and contractors.

Solution

Created PH Trust Scores to verify users, assess financial health, and mitigate identity risks, enabling workers and contractors to make informed, trustworthy connections.

Demonstrated Results

PH Trust Scores implemented for 10,000 users; scaling to 500,000+ in two months.

• 7x higher employment probability for verified members.
• Reduction in vendor sprawl, accelerated onboarding, and strengthened the overall ecosystem trust.

Introduction

With Bureau’s suite of fraud prevention solutions, ProjectHero is formalizing India’s fragmented construction industry while also making trust, credibility, and financial reliability measurable and actionable for every worker and contractor

ProjectHero is one of the largest professional networks for the construction industry, connecting over 500,000 workers, 70,000+ small contractors, and 20 large general contractors on a single platform. Having facilitated over $5 million in orders, the platform helps users engage in gigs and access financial services in an industry that has traditionally operated in silos.

The Challenge

Building Reliability in a Fragmented Market

Largely informal, fragmented, and difficult to navigate, the construction industry has no verifiable profiles, work history, or reputation insights for workers and operators. This creates inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and high operational risk.

ProjectHero set out to formalize the ecosystem. However, it required addressing issues such as credibility, trust, and identity challenges across all stakeholders. While building a professional, transparent network that would ensure verified workers, reliable contractors, and trustworthy financial and identity signals, the platform faced the following challenges:

• No Credibility in a Fragmented Industry: The challenges managing 500 offline contract workers translated into the online platform as well. The workers would accept jobs, underperform, and move on; contractors had no profiles or verifiable history. This lack of credibility caused significant loss of time, resources, and opportunities.

• Instilling Trust in a Traditionally Unregulated Segment: The platform needed to ensure skill-tested, genuine workers, and thoroughly verified contractors to solve the price and quality discovery problem in the industry.

• Building a Strong Trust Ecosystem: Key challenges included:

  • Verification: Ensuring both workers and contractors are legitimate.
  • Financial Reliability: Confirming contractors’ financial health to reduce payment risks.
  • Identity Risks: Preventing ‘fly-by-night’ behavior, where entities change numbers or disappear mid-gig.

“Building a strong system of record is absolutely essential for Project Hero. The transformation of this industry is dependent on this. There was no way to get these signals from one place. We were working with multiple API providers & vendors. But none of them were giving us the comfort of scaling,”

Satya Vyas
CEO and Co-founder

The Solution

Putting Numbers Behind Trust

Bureau powered Project Hero’s PH Trust Scores, a unique scoring system for each entity on the platform, by supplying real-time intelligence on financial, identity, and behavioral signals. This enabled the company to reliably measure reputation and trustworthiness for every user on the platform. The PH Trust Scores were used to:

• Verify Workers and Contractors: Strengthen ProjectHero’s KYC capabilities by verifying workers’ identities, phone numbers, financial histories, and employment patterns. Contractors, especially small and medium businesses (often partnerships or proprietorships), were verified through Bureau’s Know Your Business (KYB) services.

• Evaluate Financial Signals: Enrich the PH Trust Scores and reduce financial risk across the network by assessing the financial capabilities of the contractors for timely worker payments, as well as evaluating workers’ employment histories and payment channels (bank or UPI).

• Mitigate Identity Risks: Minimize risks, track users in real time to flag risky behaviors and minimize risks using Bureau’s Phone Network Intelligence that analyzes phone behaviors, including reachability, roaming status, and historical patterns.

• Assess Digital Footprint: Evaluate users’ digital presence and behavioral patterns to add an additional layer of trust and inform the PH Trust Score.

The Bureau Advantage

Measurable Impact Across the Network

Powered by Bureau’s real-time risk decisioning, PH Trust Scores helped ProjectHero verify more than 10,000 users soon after deployment and scaled it to over 500,000. Notable impact included:

• A 7x increase in employment probability of verified users
• PH Trust Scores created for 10,000 users, providing valuable real-time insights into behavior and transactions.
• Bureau’s single unified platform helped the company eliminate vendor sprawl, enabling faster go-live and aggregated signals, easing the burden on ProjectHero’s engineering and product teams.
• Extended PH Trust Scores to its entire half-million user base within two months.

Enabling Credibility at Scale

Bureau’s integrated platform allowed ProjectHero to scale trust-building without vendor fragmentation. This not only accelerated platform adoption and formalization of the construction ecosystem, but also allowed ProjectHero to:

• Verify users and contractors.
• Assess their financial health.
• Mitigate identity-related risks.
• Build trust in an otherwise unregulated, digitally backward, and informal industry.

Core Capabilities:

• Device Intelligence: Identifies trusted devices with real-time risk analysis against 160+ signals like rooted devices, emulator usage, and spoofed environments.
• Behavioral Biometrics: Profiles user behavior to instantly flag anomalies bots, impersonation, session hijacking, and more.
• Graph Analysis: Maps interconnected users, devices, and IPs to unearth fraud rings and collusion at scale.
• Identity Verification: Performs seamless identity and liveness checks for onboarding.
• Contextual Decisioning: Dynamically adapts authentication and access according to contextual risk levels.
• Privacy-first Design: Built to meet global data protection standards across industries and markets.

Bureau’s unified risk decisioning platform helps marketplaces expand to new geographical locations with confidence while ensuring local, regional, and global compliance.

Conclusion

With Bureau, ProjectHero is able to connect workers and contractors, while also building a unified system of trust that is transforming an informal, fragmented industry into a professional, credible network.

About Bureau

Bureau is a risk decisioning platform for digital user journeys that helps digital businesses verify users, detect fraud, and secure trust in real time. Trusted by 200+ global companies across financial institutions, fintechs, digital marketplaces, and consumer internet companies, Bureau powers safer, smarter digital ecosystems across the world.