Pinch Identity Number
A real customer isn't a single email. The same person buys under two different addresses, uses three phone numbers, accesses your site from two devices, and changes emails after every breach. The Pinch Identity Number is the stable ID Pinch assigns that survives all of those identifier changes — so a workflow can ask "has this person abused us before?" rather than "has this email abused us before?"
What gets linked
Pinch links the identifiers below into a single Identity Number when it sees them co-occur in your event stream:
- Phone
- Address (billing or shipping)
- Device fingerprint (from the Pinch JS SDK)
- IP address
- Payment instrument (BIN + last 4, hashed)
- PIN (postal code)
Two events sharing two or more of these identifiers — say, a new email signing up from a device that's already associated with a known abusive email — are merged into one Identity Number.
Where the Identity Number appears
| Surface | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| API responses | The pinchCustomerId field on Order, Return, Signup, Login, and Account responses |
| Customer profile in the dashboard | Top of the profile, above the Pinch Assessment score |
| Customer Graph view | Visual graph showing every linked identifier behind one Identity Number |
| Variables | Identity-linked variables aggregate across every identifier tied to the same Identity Number (e.g. Num returns per identity in last 1 year) |
How it differs from your customer ID
Your platform (Shopify, Salesforce, etc.) issues its own customer ID. That ID is per-account on your platform — if the same person creates two accounts, they have two of your IDs but one Pinch Identity Number.
Pinch sends you back its Identity Number on every API response. Pass that through to your reporting if you want a stable cross-account view of customer behavior.
Customer Graph
The Customer Graph view in the dashboard renders the Identity Number as a central node with all linked identifiers (emails, phones, addresses, devices) as connected nodes. Hovering an edge shows when and how Pinch made the link.
Use this when investigating a flagged customer to understand whether they're a single person with messy data, or a deliberate multi-account abuser.
Privacy
The Identity Number is internal to Pinch. It's not exposed to your customers. PII fields (email, phone) feeding the graph are hashed at rest. You can request deletion of any Identity Number and its linked PII via support@pinch.ai — see Security & privacy (coming soon).