FaceFirst launches facial recognition solution for retail return fraud prevention

Jun 11, 2018, 1:46 pm EDT | Chris Burt

FaceFirst has launched retail return fraud prevention product Fraud-IQ to provide brick-and-mortar stores with an added layer of intelligence for assessing if returns are legitimate. Customer service reps can determine if people are returning goods they did not enter the store with using Fraud-IQ’s facial recognition capabilities.

“Retailers are under assault from organized retail criminals and other dishonest customers,” said FaceFirst CEO Peter Trepp. “Fraud-IQ will put a significant dent in a massive industry problem. This is a product that everyone from loss prevention employees to the CEO can get excited about.”

Retail return policies are being widely abused, as National Retail Federation research shows that 10.8 percent of returns are fraudulent, costing retailers $9.6 billion annually. Trepp also said that the average cost of a fraudulent return incident is over a thousand dollars.

FaceFirst says its retail security facial recognition platform reduces shoplifting by 34 percent, and in-store violence by 91 percent on average, while Fraud-IQ automatically deletes user videos after two hours to adhere to FaceFirst’s Privacy by Design mandate. Trepp told Biometric Update that continued focus on privacy by facial recognition providers is necessary to foster public support for the technology.

“Fraud-IQ is driven by customer demand,” said Trepp. “We’re seeing rapid face recognition adoption across big box, grocery and pharmacy retailers, and Fraud-IQ will accelerate the trend across the sector.”

Biometric and advanced authentication technology has been applied to the online retail environment recently, as in the implementation of Pindrop’s Phoneprinting technology at Shop Direct, but deployment of facial recognition to brick-and-mortar retail has so far mostly focused on self-service IoT applications.