How it works
How a confirmed compromise reaches your fraud team
Q6 operates inside the private forums, encrypted channels, and criminal marketplaces where stolen checks, cards, credentials, and accounts are traded. Every finding is validated by a person inside that community before it reaches you, so what arrives is a confirmed compromise tied to your institution — not an exposure score to triage.
We navigate the Dark Web, which is like an intricate cave system
It takes considerable skill and experience to find and gain access to any single marketplace, channel, or forum — let alone the ones dealing exclusively in high-value financial crime, and to hold that access without ceasing. There are no neat layers waiting to be browsed. There are passages, sealed entrances, and rooms you are admitted to only if someone vouches for you.
These are kinds of place, not depths — a marketplace sits beside an encrypted channel, and both sit beside a forum you cannot enter. Every lit chamber was entered by a person with a history in it, and the access is held continuously: 24/7/365, across more than 10,000 channels and 4 million sources.
Select a kind of community to see where Q6 holds access.
1Open & surface webNot where Q6 operates
Paste sites, public leak indexes, social channels. Cheap to reach, and where most dark web monitoring stops — which is why what it returns is usually stale by the time anyone sees it.
2Automated marketplaces
Purpose-built card, check, and account shops with search, filtering, and instant checkout. A buyer narrows to one institution’s cardholders with a dropdown.
3Encrypted channels
Telegram and private messaging groups where check and card inventory is shopped in real time, and where balance information and alteration techniques are traded between fraudsters.
4Deep web & closed forums
Vetted, invitation-only communities. Reputation and history are required to enter, and neither can be bought, scraped, or licensed from a reseller.
How we deliver the right information with enough time to close the gap
Collection is the beginning, not the product. What separates a finding from an alert is everything that happens between the two.
Stage 1
Collection
Continuous coverage of dark, deep, and open sources, plus malware and C2 infrastructure, with human intelligence inside the communities themselves.
- More than 10,000 channels and 4 million sources
- 24/7/365, across five regions
- Interception at the moment a fraudster uploads
Stage 2
Processing & enrichment
AI-fueled technology and expertly trained HUMINT together, so a finding arrives with the context a fraud team needs rather than a record to research.
- Context on the what, who, and how
- Tagged by fraud typology and prioritized
- Deduplicated at source; noise and false positives removed
Stage 3
Intelligence delivery
Confirmed compromises reach your team typically within 10 to 60 minutes of surfacing, structured and normalized for the way you already work.
- 100% confirmed compromises — no exposure scores
- IntelliHawQ portal, syncing every 10 minutes
- Or a structured, automation-ready API feed
What your team does with a confirmed compromise
Findings are organized around the fraud scenarios your team already runs playbooks for, so an alert arrives pointing at a decision. Q6 is not a replacement for transaction monitoring or takeover detection — it is the layer that lets those controls fire on the right account, at the right moment.
Stolen or altered check
Stop the specific item
Apply Positive Pay to the exact check, place a stop payment, or close the account. Positive Pay is a strong control, but it only helps if you know which check to stop. Q6 is what makes it precise instead of reactive.
≈ 7 days average lead time before a deposit is attempted
Compromised payment card
Reissue the right cards
Reissue, limit reissue to higher-risk sources, or elevate risk scoring and tighten controls instead. Historical analysis identifies the common point of compromise behind a cluster.
Typically a 30%+ reduction in debit card fraud losses
Compromised credentials
Treat the device, not just the password
The root cause is credential-stealing malware on a customer or employee device, which is why a session from that machine looks trusted. Contact the customer about cleaning the device, and flag the account for step-up authentication or manual review.
Delivered as a confirmed compromise, not an exposure score
Merchant & processor breach
Move before the brands report it
Breaches at merchants and payment processors that may expose your cards are frequently identified before the card brands and processors report them, and often weeks before they are public.
Weeks of warning on third-party breaches
A threat intelligence team built only for financial crime
100+
Years of combined threat-intelligence experience
5
Regions with standing analyst personas
Our sources are proprietary because our people are.
This is not dark web monitoring bolted onto a cyber platform, a DRP feed, or a module a core banking provider resells. Financial crime is the entire company, and the team is concentrated where the most fraud actually happens.
Technology alone does not get you inside a private forum, an invite-only marketplace, or a criminal’s Telegram channel. Q6’s analysts hold established, long-standing personas across the underground, build the relationships that earn trust in closed communities, and operate in the languages of Eurasia, LATAM, Europe, China, and the U.S.
A screenshot in one of your alerts comes from inside a community we have earned access to — not from a crawler, a paste site, or a resold breach feed. We do not name specific sources, because naming them would burn the access.
Q6’s leadership has spent their careers in financial crime investigation, fraud prevention, and threat intelligence. That is why the output is shaped for a fraud team rather than a CTI analyst, and why we know which findings matter and which are noise.
What makes Q6 different?
The dark web monitoring and threat intelligence category is crowded
Most providers fall into one of two camps: broad cyber threat intelligence platforms that treat fraud as one signal among many, or identity and credential tools built for account takeover, not financial crime as a whole. Q6 was built specifically for financial institutions, and it shows in a few ways.
Access to the sources that matter most
Typical tools. Generic dark web and identity-monitoring tools typically aspire to be a one-stop shop for all industries. They rarely reach the niche marketplaces and channels where advanced fraudsters operate.
Q6. We are built for financial institutions, and have always been focused on identifying and operating inside the communities that specifically target them. Our coverage of the financial crimes ecosystem is deep and persistent.
Focused collection, not a bundled platform
Typical tools. Some vendors pair monitoring with case-management or brand-protection tools.
Q6. Q6 stays focused on one thing: high-fidelity, source-level collection and attribution. That focus is what lets us go deeper into the specific criminal communities and marketplaces where financial fraud actually originates.
Built for financial crime, not general cyber risk
Typical tools. Many providers monitor the dark web for phishing, brand abuse, and generic breach exposure.
Q6. Q6 is built exclusively around financial crime — ACH and wire fraud, account takeover, check fraud, payment card fraud, and more — so every alert is relevant to a fraud or security team’s actual workflow.
Structured around fraud typologies, not generic alerts
Typical tools. Generic alert streams that leave your team to work out which findings map to real fraud scenarios.
Q6. Q6’s intelligence is organized around the specific fraud scenarios financial institutions deal with every day — check fraud, card compromise, account takeover, deposit fraud — so it maps directly to how your team already works.
Instrument-level intelligence, not just identity exposure
Typical tools. Identity and credential tools largely stop at recapturing breached logins, with limited context on risk and severity.
Q6. Q6 goes further, tracking the compromised financial instruments themselves — stolen checks, compromised cards, and the accounts they are tied to. So you see the fraud attempt coming, not just the underlying exposure.
Q6 is not a replacement for transaction monitoring or takeover detection, and it does not sit in an account-opening waterfall. It is the proactive layer in front of them — and it is the reason the controls you already own fire on the right account at the right moment.
We are already inside. Let us show you what we have on your institution.
Before the call we collect against your public BINs, routing numbers, domains, and executive names. Nothing is required from you, and none of it is a sample data set.