Digital ID fraud rates and biometrics use increase substantially during pandemic: IDnow report

A substantial surge in online fraud attempts has been noticed since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new report from IDnow, though the company says its biometric security has held firm.

The “Security Report 2020,” analyses the main trends in the computer security industry, and its vulnerabilities throughout the year.

According to the new data, an increase in remote working and a bigger demand for digital services and processes coincided with a surge of 250 percent in fraud attempts. Between March and June alone, cases of similarity fraud increased by 231 percent, together with fake-ID fraud rising by 180 percent and social engineering attacks by 75 percent.

The IDnow report also shows that many of these attacks targeted particularly vulnerable people through phishing attempts, for example, impersonating government aid programs and false job advertising.

“In the past few months, our security system has seen a sharp increase in fraud attempts and numerous new methods against which we protect our customers,” said Armin Bauer, co-founder and managing director Technology at IDnow.

To combat these attempts, IDnow has now been working on a new security solution, Bauer explains.

“We have invested in a comprehensive concept and early indicator detection to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters.”

Despite these growing figures, however, the new research clarifies that false acceptance rates (FARs) of biometric security systems remained constant since last year.

In fact, IDnow has reported a 1,000 percent increase in the number of transactions using the company’s AutoIdent platform from January to June. The solution uses a combination of advanced AI and machine learning to provide biometric user verification on mobile devices.

According to IDnow, AutoIdent has been trained on millions of datasets and was backed by the expertise of a large network of various identity and fraud specialists. The platform offers face recognition capabilities, together with document verification features capable of recognizing IDs in more than thirty languages and from 195 countries.

In its latest report, IDnow highlights the importance of liveness detection solutions to combat online fraud, saying that current regulations require a biometric system for governmental use to have a FAR of below 0.1 percent.

The AutoIdent solution from IDnow has a FAR of only 0.03 percent, making it ideal for applications requiring highly precise facial recognition capabilities.

IDnow is now trying to increase the security of its platform even further.

“In addition to technical warning systems, we have set up an anti-fraud team here to do research in Darknet, test fake ads ourselves, and exchange information with victims to study the exact approach of the fraudsters,” Bauer explained. “In this way, we can detect and avoid attempts of attacks at an early stage.”

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  fraud prevention  |  identity verification  |  IDnow  |  remote authentication