Your Face as Data: Scammers Exploit It for Fraud. Here Are 5 Tips for Secure Identity Verification

Historically, many organizations deployed identity verification (IDV) protocols to comply with regulatory standards within their specific sectors. Nonetheless, these methods have expanded into various uses, encompassing tasks that are commonplace for numerous individuals today: safeguarded client registration, streamlined remote employment processing, protection during online transactions on e-commerce sites and gig economy platforms, as well as identifying fraudulent activities.

This variety of tasks makes selection more difficult. IDV solutions , questioning the universal applicability of solutions across various sectors. Nonetheless, several crucial aspects can steer the assessment process, extending beyond typical criteria such as sector type and business dimensions.

What to look at first?

1. Is the solution comprehensive enough to include all the crucial stages of the IDV process?

Many of the individual verification (IDV) solutions available today incorporate both document and biometric authentication processes, forming the backbone of identity confirmation. This process encompasses capturing an identification document, evaluating its authenticity, and extracting pertinent information from it for additional checks. biometric The section usually involves taking a self-portrait and then comparing faces.

Can you measure the effectiveness of document and biometric checks? Absolutely! For instance, you can use the retake score — the need to redo the verification process, which arises when the initial attempt falls short of clarity or fails to satisfy established criteria — to evaluate the document and/or selfie capture modules.

Nevertheless, there’s a caveat. Even though numerous vendors make comparable assertions, it's essential to scrutinize the sample data utilized for measuring such metrics concerning software efficacy. For instance, a developer might assert having 100% OCR accuracy—indicating complete effectiveness. Optical Character Recognition technology To precisely extract and transform text from identity documents into a digital format, high accuracy is essential for properly capturing information and reducing mistakes during the validation procedure. However, how can one ensure that this level of precision isn’t just derived from handling particular types of documents like German passports or Louisiana driver’s licenses exclusively? Should your focus remain strictly within these regions, then achieving accurate results should pose no problem. Yet, would similar levels of correctness hold true when dealing with materials originating from places such as the United Arab Emirates instead?

Qualitative metrics should also be considered. High-end IDV software needs to effectively verify all security aspects. Essentially, it ought to manage various kinds of Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) information. MRZ ) interpret and retrieve data (such as photographs) from various types of barcodes and other sections within these documents. Furthermore, the system must have the capability to read the Near Field Communication (NFC) chip holding the individual’s identification particulars and transmit this data to a protected server controlled by the organization verifying their identity. By doing so, it ensures both the authenticity and security of the provided identity through a dual-stage validation method. prevent fraud .

The thoroughness and precision of the document template database are equally crucial since they play a key role in recognizing the wide array of existing identification papers such as passports, driving licenses, and residency permits.

Related: The 'Mother of All Breaches' Has Occurred — Here Are the Security Implications for Companies

2. Is the solution capable of identifying contemporary forms of fraud?

AI-enabled attacks like deepfakes is an increasing menace that organizations can no longer afford to overlook. Regula's global survey indicates that roughly 80% of businesses globally consider different forms of deepfake fraud to be an actual danger. Such fraudulent activities involve synthetic creations of pictures, video clips, or sound recordings that closely imitate genuine individuals with high fidelity.

Recently, an incident occurred involving the Hong Kong office of a global corporation, which lost $25 million Following an incident where a fraudster employed deepfake techniques to mimic the company’s chief financial officer (CFO) during a collective video conference, employees were directed to initiate fund transfers.

Unsurprisingly, both companies and government entities consider the ability of an ID verification system to detect identity fraud as one of the key factors when making their decision.

It is crucial to comprehend how the supplier addresses the deepfake threat by posing specific queries regarding pertinent features. For example, ask about the software’s ability to identify different kinds of presentations. attacks — when a fraudster presents fake, altered or otherwise manipulated biometric samples (like facial images, video or voice recordings) to deceive and gain access through a biometric security system — and the mechanisms it employs to unveil them.

You might consider evaluating how effectively the solution handles various forms of identity theft involving deepfakes. Scammers could present a fabricated photograph or video showing a supposed “live” individual during the selfie verification step. To ensure accurate identification, the system must be capable of recognizing still facial images, electronic gadgets, recorded videos, as well as injected video content.

Related: Facial Recognition Tech Is Speeding Up Registration—While Igniting Privacy Worries

3. Is the seller's approach to development aligned with recent shifts in the market?

The requirements from businesses, user expectations, and industry standards are evolving. The introduction of new identification formats has led to this change. digital identities and mobile driver's licenses, vendors have to consider these verification scenarios when bringing their solutions to the market.

For this reason, flexibility and technological competence have become crucial criteria when assessing IDV developers. For instance, mono solutions that only verify domestic documents seem out-of-date in the era of global migration, digital nomadism, remote customer onboarding and online transactions. With physical document fraud still prevalent, robust IDV systems must include a complete set of authenticity checks, like document liveness — a verification method used to ensure a document is original and not forged or altered, typically checked through real-time presentation or authenticity features.

The vendor's product development roadmap is the right starting point to gain the required insight. The roadmap visualizes the vendor's strategic plan, showing the details of upcoming improvements and features that will roll out soon.

Related: Deepfakes Are Increasing — Could This Alter How Companies Authenticate Their Customers?

4. Is your customer base completely satisfied with the process of determining individual values?

A customer-focused strategy is now central to numerous business operations, such as identity confirmation. customer experience Customer experience (CX) acts as both a driving force and a key metric for success in numerous organizations adopting identity verification (IDV) solutions. According to Regula’s survey, enhancing customer satisfaction was cited by 29% of businesses as their primary motivation for deployment. Furthermore, 55% of business representatives identified enhanced CX as the leading measure of success for these IDV initiatives.

Typically, the decision on how to seamlessly integrate an IDV solution within your present workflows lies with you. Nonetheless, ensuring compatibility across different platforms as well as customizing these solutions rests solely with the developer. To put it simply, effective cross-platform solutions designed for both web environments and mobile applications allow you to establish a smooth IDV process which boosts overall customer contentment.

Automation serves as a pillar in adopting a customer-focused strategy. Clients and staff alike would welcome the ability to bypass mundane aspects of the IDV procedure such as inputting data or identifying document types.

For example, Skylegs, which is an aviation management platform, reports After implementing IDV software for aircraft operators, positive customer feedback was received. The data entry automation allows operators to handle passports and ID cards with greater ease, speed, and accuracy.

5. Does this solution increase the return on investment for your IDV expenditure?

Assess an Individual Development Vehicle (IDV) solution as a key investment influencing various outcomes. For instance, consider the Canadian travel initiative. Sherpa cut annual operational costs by 15% after IDV automation.

Identity verification goes beyond just confirming documents and people; typically, numerous related applications are present within each organization. An effective comprehensive ID verification system enables companies to minimize security threats, adhere to Know Your Customer regulations, and enhance user contentment.

A comprehensive solution typically indicates extensive coverage across various individual development vehicle scenarios. This approach needs to be flexible enough to cater to multiple sectors, ranging from highly controlled fields such as Aviation, Gaming, and Finance, to less restricted areas like Online Education or Retail Commerce.

By opting for single-vendor solutions that encompass every facet of identity verification—from biometric identification to document validation—you receive not only thorough but also user-friendly software as an added benefit. This approach ensures uniform updates across the board rather than patchwork changes. Additionally, it shields your system from issues arising due to out-of-sync updates; this way, none of the components risk losing compatibility with each other caused by delays in development timelines.

An additional tip: The quality of the dataset is crucial.

IDV vendors usually offer a demo or trial period to test the waters. You can try out various solutions and assess how their products accomplish your tasks. Some businesses test out solutions using the vendor's datasets. This approach may seem a bit biased, which is why the number and variety of specimens available for testing, as well as the level of detail in the verification results, are also important criteria to consider.

However, many organizations prefer "real data" involving physical IDs volunteered by employees from a focus group. To make the most out of this experience, you need to prepare your dataset properly.

Initially, ensure compatibility with your organization’s requirements. Should your focus be solely on identity documents from the UK, scanning and verifying the passports of British volunteers would suffice for testing purposes. However, this approach will yield insufficient outcomes if identification papers from various other nations such as Germany, the UAE, and Italy are also processed within your system.

Secondly, your dataset must be comprehensive enough to yield statistically sound metrics. As noted earlier, to achieve precise readings across all four situations, you would require an equivalent quantity of passports representing British, German, UAE, and Italian persons alike.

In conclusion

Evaluating the success of an intelligent document verification (IDV) system enables firms to confirm they meet their intended goals. Assessing metrics like user reviews and return on investment (ROI) provides crucial information about how well the IDV system works. Regularly tracking these measures and making necessary modifications is essential for enhancing the system’s efficiency.