Maskbreak vs Kount (Equifax)

Kount is a payments-and-identity platform. Maskbreak is a visit check.

Picture a stolen card being tried at your checkout. Kount’s Payments Fraud product judges the payment. It takes the device ID, IP address and location of each card-not-present transaction, scores them against what Equifax calls “a global network of billions of data points” and returns an Omniscore, which Equifax’s 2026 product sheet calls a “Transaction Safety Rating” from 0.1 to 99.9. Your policies then accept, block or challenge the order. If a chargeback lands weeks later, Kount’s dispute tools help you head it off or contest it.

Maskbreak looks at the visit that carried the card. When the browser submits your form, your server makes one call to POST /v1/evaluate and gets back allow, review or block, a 0–100 risk score and the reasons: VPN, proxy, Tor, cloud server, automation, emulator or a fake browser. It never sees the card, the amount or the basket, so it cannot score an order and does nothing about chargebacks.

So the real question is where your losses start. If they start at the payment, Kount is built for that and Maskbreak is not. If they start earlier, at fake sign-ups, credential stuffing, promo abuse or scripted card tests hitting a form, Kount now covers that ground too. Account Protection scores sign-ups, logins and account changes, and on 23 September 2026 Equifax launched Signal Score for Device and Signal Score for Email, two APIs aimed at VPNs, emulators, script-driven account farming and location spoofing at sign-up and checkout. On that ground the difference is packaging and price: one explained verdict per visit, with a Free plan and published prices from €29 a month, against quote-only pricing through Equifax’s sales team.

Maskbreak vs Kount, side by side

What is Kount? Kount’s fraud detection in 2026

Kount began as an independent fraud detection company in Boise, Idaho, and stayed one until Equifax agreed to buy it for $640 million in January 2021 and closed the deal on 11 February 2021, when its network counted “more than 9,000 leading brands and payment providers”. In March 2023 Equifax relaunched the product as Kount 360, one platform on the Equifax Cloud. In February 2026 the brand itself moved to Equifax: kount.com and kount.com/pricing now redirect to equifax.com (we checked on 24 September 2026). The product did not move. The app still runs at app.kount.com, and the API, developer docs and support site keep their kount.com addresses.

Inside Kount 360, these are the parts that matter for this comparison:

If you already run Kount, 2026 brings migration work whatever you decide. The legacy Kount Command product is being sunset, with no public end date, and Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce integrations have to be pointed at Kount 360. In May 2026 Kount 360 also moved to a new sign-in and a new token endpoint on login.equifax.com, with a recommended limit of 20 token requests a minute, and existing API integrations must switch by 15 February 2027. That is a natural moment to check which parts of the platform you actually use.

Kount pricing in 2026

Search for Kount pricing and you land at Equifax: kount.com/pricing redirects to Equifax’s identity and fraud page, which lists no prices. The pages for Payments Fraud, Chargeback Prevention, Chargeback Recovery and Authorized Payment Protection offer “Request a Demo” or “Speak with a Representative”, and the new Signal Score page and the Identity Proofing page say “Connect with our sales team”. Kount’s own support material describes usage-based invoices, with fees and usage on separate lines, but no rates are public.

The one self-serve route is Shopify. The Kount app there, listed by “Kount, an Equifax Company”, says “Free to install. Additional charges may apply.” and gives no figures; signup runs through a Shopify payment approval. Equifax pitched a self-serve Shopify route for small merchants as Kount Essentials in May 2023; today’s listing is simply called “Kount”, and the Essentials name no longer appears on it. For contrast, two e-commerce competitors do publish numbers (checked September 2026): ClearSale’s Growth plans with a chargeback guarantee start at $250 a month, and Wyllo (formerly NoFraud) lists guarantee plans on Shopify from 1% of revenue with a $250 monthly minimum, for merchants under $50K a month.

On a Kount demo call, ask how screening is billed (per transaction screened or per approved order), whether Account Protection, the Signal Scores, the chargeback tools and Identity Proofing are priced apart from Payments Fraud, whether there is a monthly minimum, and, if you already run Kount, what the move off Command and onto the new token endpoint means for your integration.

Maskbreak’s prices are on /pricing: a Free plan with 10,000 visitor checks a month, then Starter at €29, Growth at €99 and Scale at €299 a month (excluding VAT), with your usage visible at GET /v1/usage. For approved public-interest organisations, the cap comes off.

Kount competitors and alternatives

The first thing to settle is who carries the chargeback. Kount’s answer is you: it pitches itself as the “Chargeback Guarantee Alternative” and says it stops chargebacks “at 1/3 the cost” of a guarantee (Kount’s claim). Some of its best-known competitors will carry that risk for you; the others are compared with Kount on decisioning and signals. Everything below was checked in September 2026.

Kount vs Signifyd, in one line: Signifyd can cover the chargebacks on orders it approves, on its terms, and bills a share of approved order value; with Kount you keep the decision and the chargeback, and buy the tools to fight it. ClearSale vs Kount is the same split, with human reviewers and a published starting price on ClearSale’s side. Accertify vs Kount is the closest match of all: two decisioning and dispute platforms, and we found a chargeback guarantee on neither one’s pages. For a longer list with when to pick each one, see our Kount alternatives guide.

Signal Score for Device vs a Maskbreak visit check

Kount has long collected device and network data through its Device Data Collector. Signal Score for Device sells that session check as a standalone API, which makes it the part of Kount closest to a Maskbreak visit check. Its product page promises to “pierce advanced VPNs, residential proxies, and network anonymizers” and to “separate human traffic from automated bots” at sign-up and checkout. This is what each API documents.

The practical difference shows up in an everyday case: a real customer on a consumer VPN. Kount’s isProxy covers commercial VPNs and proxy servers alike. Maskbreak keeps them apart, so a VPN on its own is flagged for review while a proxy blocks, except Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which is reviewed too:

Example response, selected fields: a shopper on a consumer VPN, nothing else flagged.

{
  "decision": "review",
  "risk_score": 35,
  "reasons": ["vpn_detected"],
  "network": {
    "vpn": true,
    "proxy": false,
    "datacenter": false,
    "tor": false,
    "residential": true,
    "service": "<operator name when known>"
  }
}

Where Kount is ahead on the session: its scores draw on a cross-merchant network, and native mobile SDKs cover app traffic. Both give iCloud Private Relay a flag of its own: Kount’s isAppleRelay, and Maskbreak’s network.privacy_relay, which asks for review rather than a block. Where Maskbreak differs: the answer leads with a decision your handler can act on, fake browsers are a named reason (antidetect_browser), which Kount’s public docs do not name, and you can run it on your own traffic today without a contract. Neither documents which AI model is behind an automated visit.

Before the order exists: what a visit check sees

A card-testing run is the clearest case. A script opens your checkout from a rented cloud server and tries one stolen card after another at small amounts. Kount lists “stop card testing at the zero dollar authorization stage” among Account Protection’s jobs, and Signal Score for Device is aimed at the checkout session too. Maskbreak answers at the form submit, before your code creates the order. This is what the checkout submit from such a script can return.

Example response, selected fields: a headless browser submitting checkout from a cloud server.

{
  "decision": "block",
  "risk_score": 70,
  "reasons": ["datacenter_asn", "automation_detected"],
  "network": {
    "vpn": false,
    "proxy": false,
    "datacenter": true,
    "tor": false,
    "residential": false,
    "service": null
  },
  "device": {
    "automation": true,
    "antidetect": false,
    "emulator": false,
    "tampering_score": 0
  }
}

Your handler reads decision and never creates the order, so the card never reaches your payment processor: nothing gets scored, authorised or disputed. The cloud-server address alone would have been allow, with datacenter_asn still listed; the automation signal is what makes this a block. Proxy, Tor, automation, emulator and fake-browser signals block by default. On the console’s Rules tab you can set allow, review or block for most signals (VPN, proxy, Tor, cloud server, automation, fake browser and more). A rule changes the decision only for the signal it names, so this visit stays blocked unless you relax automation itself; when a rule does change the answer, engine_decision keeps the default.

Start in watch mode: log each decision and let everything through until the Events log looks right, then enforce (rollout guide). Our e-commerce chargeback playbook walks a stolen-card ring through the same checkpoints; it is a worked model, not a customer report. What Maskbreak does not bring: order scoring, chargeback tools, a cross-customer identity network, a manual review team, KYC, or email and phone reputation beyond the disposable-domain check. If you need those, keep a payment platform on the order and put the visit check in front of it.

When to use Kount, when to use Maskbreak