Case Study: How Crexi stopped product abuse, increased customer trust and improved lead quality with Rupt

Crexi (Commercial Real Estate Exchange, Inc.) is the leading commercial real estate marketplace in the United States, connecting brokers, buyers, and investors across billions of dollars in listings. As Crexi scaled into a larger enterprise-grade platform, protecting listings data and making sure every account represented a legitimate, trusted user became a core business priority.

Crexi uses Rupt to for two main purposes:

• Account sharing prevention
• Fake account prevention

We sat down with Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi, to discuss how Rupt helped Crexi quantify account abuse, recover revenue, and roll out verified accounts in record time without disrupting the customer experience.

"

What we thought would be a real friction point with our existing customers, we saw them go, 'oh my God, why haven't you done this sooner?'

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

The challenge: Focusing on growth while preventing abuse

For most of Crexi's first decade, the company optimized relentlessly for ease of use. That meant not limiting account sharing, or requiring new accounts to be verified. This was okay for a while, but as Crexi grew, they became a target for abuse and the issue needed to be addressed.

The team suspected abuse was happening, but they didn't have exact numbers or a mechanism to systematically identify and prevent it.

"

What Rupt is able to do is really help us identify truly how big the problem was and then give us a very simple starting point of how to start to address it.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Step 1: Getting a baseline in days

The first thing Crexi needed was hard numbers. Within a couple of days of installing Rupt, Crexi had a full diagnosis of how widespread the problem actually was. It was thousands of account abuse instances across their customer base.

That baseline turned a long-standing suspicion into a concrete business case.

"

We loved it! We were able to get up and running very quickly, immediately did a diagnosis, and oh, my God, we have thousands of account abuse instances! We always thought we had a problem, but now we know in pure raw numbers.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Step 2: Account sharing prevention rollout

With buy-in from the C-suite, sales, customer success, and product teams, Crexi began by enforcing account sharing prevention. Crexi's team started at 1–2% of traffic and ratcheted up from there as results came in.

Rupt's flexible policy configuration allowed Crexi to:

1. Start with generous limits so legitimate multi-device users never felt friction.
2. Monitor support tickets, churn, and conversion signals at every step.
3. Tighten enforcement only once each previous step proved safe.

The result was that enforcement felt like a natural evolution of the product, not an abrupt policy change.

Step 3: Turning abuse into revenue

Once Crexi could see exactly which accounts were being shared across many devices, their sales team had something they'd never had before: a fair, data-backed conversation starter.

Instead of guessing, reps could confidently tell a customer: "You're on one seat, but we can see 20 devices actively using this account. Let's get you properly set up." Customers who had quietly been sharing for years generally responded with understanding—not resistance.

The direct ROI was multiple times the cost of Rupt on its own. More importantly, it gave Crexi's sales team a credible path to move upstream into teams and enterprise, where per-seat pricing and proper access controls are table stakes.

"

We saw immediate benefits, not just in the quantification, but in additional ROI that offset any costs of deploying Rupt. It was a no-brainer.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Step 4: Account verification and the "blue check" effect

With account sharing under control, Crexi partnered with Rupt on the next layer: account verification. New accounts and leads are verified via 2FA, and existing accounts are prompted to verify at the 90-day mark.

Crexi expected pushback. Instead, they got the opposite.

• New users complete verification without friction. The accounts that do drop off during verification are overwhelmingly bots and fake sign-ups—exactly the kind of traffic Crexi wanted to weed out.
• Existing users adopted verification happily, often asking why it hadn't been available sooner.
• Verified "blue check" accounts became a signal of credibility in the marketplace. Brokers and investors prioritize verified leads because they know they're not wasting time on bots or junk emails.

"

We were worried people would hate it. Instead, they said 'Why haven't you done this sooner?' They don't see verification as friction, they see it as a feature.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Step 5: Ongoing protection — impossible travel and account takeover

Account sharing, left unchecked, has a way of becoming something worse. Credentials shared with a virtual assistant can end up in a call center, and from there in the hands of a bad actor. Rupt's impossible-travel and account-takeover protection give Crexi a frontline defense against that progression.

Crexi uses Rupt's real-time signals to challenge suspicious new devices, new countries, and new IPs—protecting both the customer and the listings data they trust Crexi to store.

"

We love the impossible-travel feature. You're keeping the bad people away. It's a thankless, proactive job, and knowing Rupt has our back helps me sleep better at night.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Did it cause churn?

No. Crexi's careful, incremental rollout kept churn flat. Customer success was prepared for complaints, but the volume of tickets was far lower than expected. The few customers who did push back were generally accounts that had been sharing for years and accepted the change once given the data.

Counterintuitively, the biggest surprise was how positively existing long-time customers received the changes, both the abuse prevention and the account verification.

"

The fear of 'my customers are going to hate me' is the thing holding people back. You can always dial it back, but in today's world, verification is an expectation. People want to feel more secure.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

Results

• Thousands of account abuse instances identified within days of installing Rupt.
• Immediate, measurable ROI — multiple times the cost of Rupt on day one and fund additional investment in security.
• New revenue unlocked by converting shared accounts into properly licensed seats, with a clear path upstream into teams and enterprise deals.
• Higher lead quality for the Crexi marketplace thanks to verified "blue check" accounts and reduced bot sign-ups.
• Stronger security posture across account sharing, account takeover, and fake account scenarios.
• No meaningful churn impact from the rollout.

Tips for a successful rollout

We asked Adam what he'd tell another product or security leader evaluating Rupt. His advice:

1. Look for partners, not vendors. Our relationship is a partnership, not just a vendor-customer relationship. We work together to solve a problem that's been growing for a while, and we have each other's back at all times.
2. Treat it as an investment, not an expense. The mindset matters. Rupt is a force multiplier—it protects revenue and generates new revenue.
3. Get a baseline first. Measure the size of the problem before you try to solve it. You cannot make a business case on a hunch.
4. Get organizational buy-in early. Product, sales, customer success, and the C-suite all need to be on the same page. CS in particular will be the frontline for any pushback.
5. Roll out gradually. Start at 1–2%, use Rupt's device limits and skip features generously, and tighten as each step proves safe.
6. Pair account sharing prevention with account verification. The two products compound: one recovers revenue, the other builds long-term trust and weeds out fake accounts.
7. Don't underestimate your customers. In 2026, verified accounts are an expectation. Most users will see verification as a feature, not friction.

Looking ahead

Crexi and Rupt continue to partner closely on new protections as AI agents, automated sign-up attacks, and shifting user behavior change what a trusted account looks like. For Crexi, the goal is simple: make sure every account on the platform is a real, trusted, verified user—so that brokers, investors, and the Crexi team can all operate with confidence.

"

We view Rupt as the long-term solution. We want to extend and expand the partnership—whatever you come up with in your crazy lab, we're happy to take a look and see how it benefits us.

 

Adam Siegel, VP of Product Growth at Crexi

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