Another report from a group called ‘Onfido’ came to my attention in the past year. Yes, I’m way behind in the articles I want to read. Almost as badly as I am with reading books. So, first, who is Onfido? Appears to be a group of Oxford students who in maybe 2012 figured out how to automate part of (all?) background checks using AI/ML. They compare selfie-photos with those on scanned documents. They do Optical Character Recognition. Since 2016 they’ve moved into the financial services area with attention on KYC compliance. In 2016 they started getting heavy venture capital funding and have a link to an ex-google dude as CCO (Chief Compliance Officer?). They found a niche and know how to replicate what others do these days when you find one.
So their background justifies the article I’m reading.
The article is a review of document fraud which they sort into the following categories:
- Stolen blank government docs
- forgeries: create a document by imitation
- doctored copies: take a legitimate, already valid document, and alter it.
- stolen documents: tied to identity fraud
- legitimate documents obtained by fraud
- fictitious or mostly fictitious documents: they suggest this is rare and has things like ‘Republic of Texas’.
- fudged/edited ‘dummy’ or ‘display’ documents; ones which govts keep around but are not intended for use (I think this is analogous to pocketbook SSNs)
They also categorize by sophistication level into 4 ‘tiers’ with the most difficult to spot comprising maybe 5% and are often connected to criminal rings while the easiest comprise maybe 20% and are typically pretty amateurish.
It is an interesting survey into the methods of document fraud. I’m wondering if there aren’t classes of such fraud that are tied to digitized mechanisms for document generation. For instance, could someone hack a DMV and get drivers licenses shipped to where I want/need? I guess you could lump that into either ‘stolen’ or ‘legitimate but obtained fraudulently’ but the sense I have is that the authors see all of this as being conducted by literal handiwork of humans. I would guess that they would make allowances for computer aided fraud with regards to doctoring , etc.
The paper also talked about things to use to help – for instance details of the document, consistence of things like font, logical errors, and the like. Most of them seem tied to a pretty careful examination by a human again. I suspect font consistency could be computerized.
Not bad for a short read, makes me think how this is used in the financial services – I’m sure it is since our company has a document authentication service. Embarrassingly enough, I don’t know a lot about it.
SteveV Thoughts on Fraud and Financial Services 