Kate Fitzgerald reports:
The widespread shift to e-commerce and touchless payments during the pandemic has escalated fraud risk in those channels, including the possibility of fraudsters combining altered photos with synthetic ID, Experian warns.
A trick Experian is calling “Frankenstein IDs” could see fraudsters this year using machine learning to invent fake facial images, which combined with fictional identities could add a new and more virulent edge to fast-growing synthetic ID fraud, the global information company said in a new forecast.
Synthetic fraud — where fraudsters use a combination of real and made-up identity information to create new account IDs — is one of the fastest-growing and most insidious types of fraud in the last few years, and now facial recognition could make it worse, said Kathleen Peters, Experian Decision Analytics’ chief innovation officer.