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Here’s a scary thought: There are now so many criminal breaches of consumer-information databases that they rarely even make the news anymore. In 2023, there were more than 3,200 major database breaches, 78 percent more than the previous year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.
Given this, it’s wise to assume that much of your personal information is available to criminals; it’s well documented that there is a thriving open market for personal information on the dark web, where the credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and other personal data of countless Americans are bought and sold for surprisingly small amounts of cash.
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So the real question is, how can criminals be prevented from using that data for identity fraud? Or more precisely, how can financial institutions, retailers and others we transact business with know whether it is us contacting them and not an impostor?
There are increasingly hopeful answers to these questions. Here is just a small sampling of private businesses developing and deploying new technologies to thwart criminals who might be trying to impersonate you.
Phone verification
A typical fraud would have a criminal, armed with your account numbers and personal info, calling your bank or other financial account holders and impersonating you to get access to your money. Digital security companies such as Prove have come up with a clever way to identify impostors by using the customer’s phone to help verify their identity. The system will ping the phone’s SIM card to verify with the carrier that it’s you at the other end of the transaction. It also checks how long the phone has been operational and the trustworthiness of the carrier to determine whether the phone is actually yours or if it’s a burner using a cloned number.
A new tool from the company uses your phone to prefill some of the information on an application via a “secure handshake.”
“We connect those dots to answer the question: Is [the applicant] validating their own information,” says Mary Ann Miller, fraud and cybercrime executive adviser and vice president of client experience at Prove.
Scoring the likelihood you are you
Other companies, including SentiLink, work a bit further in the background when helping financial institutions determine if someone applying for an account or a monetary withdrawal is who they say they are.
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