DEV Community

Cover image for Building a fraud detection and data quality API for Latin America
Mediavox
Mediavox

Posted on

Building a fraud detection and data quality API for Latin America

#ai #security #webdev #latam

If you've built anything for Latin America, you know the pain:

  • 2M+ phishing SMS per month in Colombia alone — in Spanish, targeting local banks and fintechs
  • Names like "INVERSIONES DEMO S.A.S." that need to be split into company name + legal suffix + country
  • Addresses like "Cra 7 # 32-16 Of 2301" that geocoding services can't parse without local context
  • Phone numbers with country codes that don't match the user's declared country
  • Sanctions screening that can't fuzzy-match "José García" vs "JOSE GARCIA LOPEZ" (accents, middle names, order)

The existing tools (phone validators, safe browsing APIs, breach databases) work for the US. They don't understand that a brand name at the start of an SMS is an impersonation pattern in LATAM, or that "S.A.S." means the input is a Colombian company, not a person.

What we built

A REST API designed for Spanish-speaking Latin America. Five capabilities under one API key:

1. Security — Detect fraud in real time

The biggest pain in LATAM right now. Phishing via SMS, WhatsApp, and email targeting banks, telcos, and fintechs.

# Analyze a suspicious message
curl -X POST https://mediavox.co/mvapi/api/v1/security/threats/analyze \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-key" \
  -d '{"message": "Su cuenta sera bloqueada. Verifique en bit.ly/xyz"}'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Response:

{
  "verdict": "fraudulent",
  "confidence": 95,
  "signals": {
    "urgencyScore": 0.85,
    "brandDetected": true,
    "urlAnalysis": {
      "finalDomain": "entidad-verify.tk",
      "domainAgeDays": 3,
      "safeBrowsing": "malicious"
    },
    "phones": [],
    "ctaFound": true
  }
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

What it checks in a single call:

  • 263+ LATAM brands with impersonation detection (position-aware: brand at start = sender pattern)
  • Domain age via RDAP (domains < 7 days = almost always fraud)
  • Redirect chain resolution (follows bit.ly → final destination, up to 10 hops)
  • Safe browsing check (known malicious domains database)
  • Urgency patterns in Spanish ("será bloqueada", "últimas horas", "activa ya")
  • Phone extraction with official number verification
  • CTA detection (suspicious call-to-action patterns)

Also available: sanctions screening (OFAC, UN, EU, PEP — 65K+ entities with Spanish fuzzy matching), brand registration for monitoring, and a crowdsourced threat feed that grows with every analysis.

2. DataTools — Clean your data

Every company in LATAM has dirty data. Names misspelled, emails that bounce, addresses that geocoding services can't understand.

# Standardize a name (handles Spanish, 60K+ dictionary)
curl -X POST https://mediavox.co/mvapi/api/v1/datatools/names/standardize \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-key" \
  -d '{"text": "INVERSIONES DEMO S.A.S."}'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Response:

{
  "standardized": "Inversiones Demo",
  "type": "company",
  "company_info": {
    "legal_suffix": "SAS",
    "legal_suffix_full": "Sociedad por Acciones Simplificada",
    "country_detected": "CO"
  }
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Available endpoints:

  • names/standardize — 60K+ name dictionary, gender detection, legal suffix separation for 6 countries (CO, MX, PE, CL, EC, AR)
  • emails/validate — disposable detection, typo correction, MX record verification
  • addresses/standardize — Colombian address parsing + geocoding + DANE/INEGI/UBIGEO official codes
  • domains/validate — brand identification, DNS resolution, registration data
  • quality-score — cross-field coherence (email vs name, phone prefix vs country, disposable email with real data)

3. Compliance — KYC in one call

If you're a fintech, bank, or insurance company in LATAM, regulatory compliance isn't optional. Sarlaft (Colombia), UIF (Mexico), SBS (Peru) all require screening.

# Screen an entity against global sanctions lists
curl -X POST https://mediavox.co/mvapi/api/v1/security/sanctions/check \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-key" \
  -d '{"name": "Jose Garcia Lopez", "country": "CO"}'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Screens against OFAC, UN, EU, Interpol, and local PEP lists. Spanish fuzzy matching handles accents, name order variations, and abbreviations.

The compliance bundle (one call) combines: sanctions check + name standardization + document ID validation + quality score.

4. Finance — LATAM tax and banking 

# Validate a Colombian tax ID (NIT)
curl -X POST https://mediavox.co/mvapi/api/v1/finance/tax-id/validate \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-API-Key: your-key" \
  -d '{"document_id": "900534082", "country": "CO"}'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Validates tax IDs (NIT Colombia, RFC Mexico, RUT Chile, RUC Peru, RUC Ecuador), verifies bank account formats, and categorizes financial transactions.

5. Recognition — OCR with structure

Extract text from documents (invoices, IDs, contracts) with computer vision, then apply NER to pull structured entities: tax IDs, amounts, dates, company names, addresses.

How it works under the hood

Three things make this different from wrapping existing APIs:

1. Self-improving dictionaries. The more the API is used, the more accurate it becomes. Day one: 90%+ accuracy on names, cities, and brands across 6 LATAM countries. With traffic: approaches 99% as the system learns from every request.

2. Native Spanish NLP. Not a translation layer on top of English tools. Built from scratch for ñ, accents, regional variations, and the specific patterns of Latin American fraud (urgency language, impersonation positions, local brand aliases).

3. Crowdsourced intelligence. A free public bot (WhatsApp + Telegram) lets citizens verify suspicious messages. Every analysis enriches the threat feed. Every report strengthens detection. API customers benefit from intelligence generated organically by real users — without lifting a finger.

Beyond the API — The full ecosystem

mediaAPI is one piece. The same platform offers three more products for different use cases:

Turing AI — Embeddable AI assistant

Drop an intelligent chatbot into any website with one script tag. It connects to your actual data (CRM, invoices, inventory) and answers questions with real numbers — not generic AI responses.

<script src="https://mediavox.co/mvai/mediavox-turing.js?v=2.5" 
        data-key="your-key" data-theme="light"></script>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Features: RAG with your own content, function calling against your database, multi-tenant (one setup, many clients), feedback loop that improves over time. Supports Spanish natively.

Use case: Your customer asks "When is my next payment due?" → Turing queries your billing system and answers with the actual date and amount.

DocumentPower — Document intelligence

Upload contracts, invoices, IDs, or any document. The system extracts structured entities (amounts, dates, tax IDs, names, companies) using NER, then indexes everything for semantic search.

# Upload and extract entities
curl -X POST https://mediavox.co/mvai/api/v1/documents/upload \
  -H "X-Turing-Key: your-key" \
  -F "file=@contract.pdf"

# Search across all your documents
curl "https://mediavox.co/mvai/api/v1/documents/search?query=penalty+clause"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Use case: A compliance team uploads 500 supplier contracts. Later, they search "penalty clauses above $10K" and get instant results with page citations.

Sales Copilot — AI for field sales via WhatsApp

A sales rep sends a WhatsApp voice note or text: "Send 5 boxes of motor oil to Store #47". The AI identifies the product, the client, checks inventory and pricing, and creates the order — no app needed.

Built for LATAM distribution (TAT/retail channel). Handles Spanish product synonyms, voice transcription, and integrates with existing ERP inventory.

Use case: 900 sales reps × 30 daily store visits = 27,000 orders/month processed by AI, zero manual data entry.

n8n integration

If you use n8n, there's a community node:

npm install n8n-nodes-mediavox
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

48+ operations across all products. Drop it into any workflow — validate data before loading to your CRM, screen suppliers against sanctions lists, detect fraud in incoming messages. No code required.

Pricing

Free tier available (no credit card required). Paid plans for higher volume. Check the developer portal for current pricing.

Try it

  1. Register at the developer portal (10 seconds, no credit card)
  2. Get your API key
  3. Start calling endpoints

The interactive playground lets you test every endpoint with your own data before writing a single line of code.

Top comments (0)