What kind of effect can document or identity theft have on you? Let’s just say a lot. One out of three grown-ups in the US fall victim to Identity theft. This results in big financial losses. According to research, $20 billion USD was lost to Identity fraud in 2020.
Businesses should make sure that fraudsters are not able to have access to their company’s data. Meanwhile, they do not want to send off legitimate customers to their competitors. Customer satisfaction will not be as good if the company’s onboarding process is frustrating or cumbersome.
You must strike the optimal balance. Your customers expect convenience and flexibility. And the safety and expandability your business requires.
So, what steps do companies have to take to guard their clients and themselves?
How Businesses Benefit from Document Verification
You’ve probably heard of the process of ID and document validation. Financial companies have been doing this for a prolonged period. However, you may be accustomed to verifying an ID in a physical world. This causes customer friction, delays the process, and hinders your business from growing.
A digital document verification system allows you to remotely authenticate your consumers’ IDs. It’s a quick way to see if an ID is authentic as part of a distant onboarding process. This allows you to grow and increase the ability of your ID checks. It protects your company from fraudulent IDs while also making your clients’ lives more comfortable.
But many companies do not possess the technological know-how or the technology itself to carry out advanced verification. Identity fraud can be carried out in a number of ways, and each of them needs a different solution. Detecting these activities cause a lot of money and time. This is where a well-planned Identity and document authentication plan comes in handy.
Types of Document Fraud
Before we go into the helpfulness of document verification, let’s talk about document fraud types. It can be divided into three categories:
- Illegitimate documents: These are totally fake documents created by fraudsters.
- Modified documents: When bad actors modify someone else’s document to create a new identity
- Falsely represented documents: This means documents are real, but the person possessing the documents is not the owner.
Each of these categories then has its own specific duplicitous documents. Like modified documents can also be stolen as blank documents or they can be forged. You might be asking yourself is, how can bad actors get access to blank documents? It can happen as it did back in 2008 when criminals stole 3000 blank documents including visas and passports. These documents were worth £2.5 million.
Illegitimate documents exist in three types, compromised documents, counterfeit documents, and fantasy documents. The Republic of Texas does not exist in reality, but it was detected on one of the fraudulent documents.
And then there are two kinds of falsely represented documents, a document obtained by fraudulent activities and imposter documents, a person pretending to be someone that they are not. There are so many different techniques to tamper with a document, and every country out there has its own different identity documents with its own specific security features, and each one of them can tamper in its own way. KYC Verification is also used to verify customers.
Detecting Multiple Types of Fraud by Using Document Verification
As we all know fraud can be committed in a number of ways, and each type of fraud needs a different kind of strategy to be stopped. In order to identify modified documents, consistent data search is the key. It looks for the date of birth, expiry date, registration number, encoded data, gender, and all of the other data available on the document.
When it comes to illegitimate ID documents, authenticity analytics can be used to identify if the document really exists or not. Analytics will differentiate between the document and the template by cross-matching them.
Identifying a falsely represented document is way more complicated and difficult. This type of fraud can only be tackled by proof of ownership. Which is not as effective and has its own downsides. As it can only authenticate the document, not the person that is using the document.
What Happens when you Combine Biometric Verification and Document Verification
The most convenient way to stop falsely represented document fraud is to cross-match the picture of the person using the ID, with the picture available on the card. By conducting a facial and document check it will be clear that the person that possesses the ID document is the real owner. By far, this is the most productive way in the market to tackle fraud.
Final Thoughts
Companies around the world are adapting to these verification techniques to boost customer experience and to make their onboarding process more effective and productive. This way the customer’s as well as the company’s confidence increases because this type of customer onboarding process is more likely to keep away fraudsters.
