The problem with fighting fraud — according to GIACT EVP of Product David Barnhardt in this week’s edition of the PYMNTS Topic TBD — is how much information fraudsters have at their fingertips about regular consumers. Between the Equifax hack last year, the Exactis hack last month and the thousands of other data breaches, big and small, that happened between them (not to mention before them), the average American consumer can rest assured that some or all of their personal data is floating around the dark web these days.
With consumer data now available in what Barnhardt called “wholesale” quantities, fraudsters have a real incentive to create synthetic identities — fraudulent consumer profiles, engineered to defeat traditional fraud detection solutions by using as much real consumer data as possible.
He said, “The situation we see all of the time with our customers is they experience a fraud where almost everything looked right. The ‘customer’ in question used all the right real data: real address, right name, right social security number, right password. The two things that were different is that they placed a different phone number in as their contact point and signed up for text notifications.”