Trulioo’s Hal Lonas on how he applies aeronautics principles to fighting fraud

CTO takes Biometric Update Podcast to identity and beyond

Mar 6, 2026, 4:42 pm EST | Joel R. McConvey

Trulioo’s Hal Lonas on how he applies aeronautics principles to fighting fraud

Rocket science is routinely held up as the ultimate example of a highly complex discipline. But Trulioo’s Hal Lonas found it a little dull.

“I have a degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and did that really early in my career. And you know, what I found was that I was a little bit impatient.” Not wanting to spend years working on something he might never see realized, Lonas turned his attention to a faster-moving sector: cybersecurity and fraud prevention.

“You know, I think identity verification and the things we do with biometrics are, are very, very close to cybersecurity, with kind of good guys and bad guys and a lot of technology going on all the time,” says Trulioo’s chief technology officer. “And we see the bad guys really taking advantage of the technology. They’re early adopters, you know, and they take advantage of things like the advances in chips and GPUs and AI. They’ve created this pretty impressive sort of toolbox for creating a synthetic identity or a deepfake that’s indistinguishable from a human being.”

Lonas cites the heroes of the Apollo 13 mission among those who inspire him to tackle the problem of synthetic identity fraud at scale.

“I think that kind of slogan that, you know, the famous thing, ‘failure is not an option’ goes back to how you build systems and how you think about building trust and making sure that identities are secure.”