How to conquer synthetic identity fraud
Carey O’Connor Kolaja, 29 June 2021
“No single organization can stop synthetic identity fraud on its own,” reports The Federal Reserve. “Fraudster tactics continually evolve to stay a step ahead of detection—and the most sophisticated fraudsters can operate at scale in organized crime rings, generating significant losses for the payments industry. It is imperative that payments industry stakeholders work together, share information and keep up with the threat.”
Synthetic fraud is today’s fastest-growing type of financial crime. To make matters worse, up to 95% goes undetected by regular fraud models, as these actors behave, act and look like regular customers that neither the human eye nor highly complex computer vision methods would have detected.
With synthetic fraud being so difficult to detect, what can we do to defeat it? Well, like many things in life, the solutions are right in front of us, and sometimes so simple we cannot see it.
The secret is putting aside our innate competitive drive to focus on teamwork, collaboration and partnership. Businesses must pivot toward protecting one another and implementing safer ecosystems that can improve equitability and access across demographics and socioeconomic levels.
How might putting aside our competitive drive to focus on the greater good work? Here are a few examples of this in action.
Would anyone have guessed a year ago that Apple and Google would collaborate to enable notifications across platforms? When the pandemic started, “contact tracing” become a part of our everyday language used to discuss COVID-19.
