AI generated deepfake fraud drives public appetite for biometrics: FIDO Alliance

A truly honest accounting of life’s constants would add, to death and taxes, the ongoing scourge of fraud. Deepfakes created with generative AI are the iteration currently causing most concern among those in the financial and digital identity verification sectors. A flurry of new reports tackle the issue of deepfakes from varying perspectives, looking at the impacts deepfake fraud can have on financial organizations, and at the solutions to be found through biometric detection tools.

1 in 2 worry about deepfakes, want biometrics for high-risk transactions

The FIDO Alliance has released a new eBook, Remote ID Verification – Bringing Confidence to Biometric Systems Consumer Insights 2024, which summarizes research from an independent study on consumer perceptions on remote identity verification, online security, and biometrics in the U.S. and UK. Asking, “how can we verify users are genuine in an online world?”, the document notes that “online identity theft has steadily risen in recent years, while the generative AI boom has driven a new wave of deepfake-powered attacks that threaten remote enrollment and identity security.”

The report’s key findings indicate that 48 percent of respondents want to use biometrics to verify themselves online in sensitive use cases like financial services, and that 52 percent of respondents are concerned about deepfakes when performing online identity verification.

Equally noteworthy are what might be termed lagging perceptions about bias in biometric systems. One in four respondents feel they experience “regular discrimination” when using automated facial recognition systems, and half say they would “lose trust in a brand or institution” found to have a biased biometric system.

“Bias in biometric systems has been monitored for some time,” notes the report. “Consumers largely agree biometric face verification systems can be accurate, but there are clear disparities in the accessibility, usability, and equity in system performance,” which can impact consumer trust and perception of biometrics.

Security, speed cited as drivers for adoption of biometric verification

Nonetheless, biometrics offer the advantages of security and speed, which customers want, particularly in financial services or digital identity transactions, for which they “demonstrated strong appetite to use biometrics to enroll and verify themselves.”

That half of respondents say they want more biometrics for secure digital identity underlines the key link between biometric identifiers and effective digital ID. Consumer concerns about deepfake fraud and identity theft are clearly rising, and worries about equity and discrimination give added urgency to the quest to develop proven, fair and accurate biometric identity verification.

FIDO notes that its newly introduced IDV selfie certification program for face verification is a valuable contribution to the effort to establish biometric ID verification that is free of bias, compliant with standards, and secure for users.

AI deepfake tools easier to access than ever before: Comcorp

A blog from biometric authentication firm Comcorp takes note of the 2024 Medius Financial Census, which finds that deepfake scams have targeted 64 percent of finance professionals in the UK and USA.

“You can find an AI site capable of building deepfakes through Google and then create a deepfake in a matter of minutes – whether voice or video, it’s easy to do,” says Daniel Isaacs, chief commercial officer at Comcorp. “People don’t need to be tech-savvy, the tools are easily accessible online. Deepfakes are as easy as self-service, and this accessibility introduces a significant risk to organizations. How can financial institutions protect themselves against, well, themselves?”

The answer, he says, is reliable biometric detection capable of running digital video against biometrically captured data to weed out digital replicas. “Protecting against deepfakes includes layering your processes with multiple checks and balances, all designed to make it increasingly complicated for fraudsters to pull off a successful scam.” For user identity and accessibility checks, he says it is essential to offer “seamless biometric identity verification systems that don’t feel intrusive but do offer increased trust.”

“Companies need a strict onboarding process that asks for both biometric and physical proof of identity; that way, security systems can immediately verify someone’s identity. This includes the use of liveness detection and deepfake detection – ensuring a real person is at the end of the camera – and ensuring secure and accurate information authentication and encryption.”

Comcorp offers a biometric authentication tool called Curata, which targets the financial services industry.

‘Burnt out and bombarded’: fraud kills morale in pros, says GBG

The UK’s GBG offers perhaps the most insistent research on deepfake fraud, proclaiming in its 2024 Global Fraud Report that “fraud is always present.”

“Having undergone its own industrialisation, fraud is a profit-making machine and no organization or individual is safe from being a potential target.” GBG’s report draws on findings from a survey of 1,200 senior fraud prevention, risk and compliance professionals, with a focus on the experience of respondents in the UK, Germany, Spain and France. Banking, cryptocurrencies, financial services, fintech, gaming and retail professionals provided answers that serve to ring a loud alarm bell about what fraud is doing to businesses.

Almost all (96 percent) of fraud prevention professionals surveyed worry about “the industrialisation of fraud,” and “almost 4 in 5 (79 percent) have seen a significant increase in the sophistication of fraud attempts in the past year.” Gen AI, phishing, smishing: it is all causing an epidemic of fraud burnout, “three in four (75 percent) of fraud prevention professionals surveyed have experienced burnout in their job due to the rising levels of fraud.”

“Fraud, risk and compliance professionals are being pushed to the brink and suffering under the weight of their responsibility to protect organizations against an onslaught of increasingly sophisticated fraud attacks,” says GBG in conclusion. But, it notes, “fraud is everyone’s problem.”

GBG offers onboarding intelligence – “a rich combination of identity data references, history and behavioral insights from multiple commercial and government sources” – through its GBG Trust platform.

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  Comcorp Online  |  deepfake detection  |  FIDO Alliance  |  financial services  |  fraud prevention  |  GBG  |  generative AI