Experian warns of facial recognition, synthetic ID fraud

Jan 112021
 
 January 11, 2021  Posted by  Breaches

Kate Fitzgerald reports:

The widespread shift to e-commerce and touchless payments during the pandemic has escalated fraud risk in those channels, including the possibility of fraudsters combining altered photos with synthetic ID, Experian warns.

A trick Experian is calling “Frankenstein IDs” could see fraudsters this year using machine learning to invent fake facial images, which combined with fictional identities could add a new and more virulent edge to fast-growing synthetic ID fraud, the global information company said in a new forecast.

Synthetic fraud — where fraudsters use a combination of real and made-up identity information to create new account IDs — is one of the fastest-growing and most insidious types of fraud in the last few years, and now facial recognition could make it worse, said Kathleen Peters, Experian Decision Analytics’ chief innovation officer.

Read more on PaymentsSource.
But if it is a synthetic ID, what risk does it pose to real individuals? If they use your SSN, I can see where it might impact your credit history and accounts, but what if they use your name and date of birth with other unrelated information? How can this impact you? I think we need to get more understanding of synthetic fraud and how it can impact individuals, so I’ve reached out to Experian to see if we can get greater understanding of the risks.

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