5 Common Uses of Synthetic IDs with Stuart Wells

May 8 2024 • 42 mins

There are entire communities set up to fight fraud that use synthetic IDs as well as scammer gangs that are advancing their creative ways to use these documents. This is changing regularly as biometric authentication advances continue.

Today’s guest is Stuart Wells. Stuart is the CTO of Jumio and is responsible for all aspects of Jumio’s innovation, machine learning, and engineering. He is an industry veteran with more than 30 years of tech experience. He was previously the Chief Product and Technology Officer at FICO, and held executive positions at Avaya and Sun Microsystems.

Show Notes:

[1:18] - Stuart shares his background and what he does at Jumio as the Chief Technology Officer.
[3:20] - The science behind document protection is literally decades old.
[5:06] - Stuart describes the process of verifying a document at Jumio.
[5:57] - What are the practical uses of synthetic IDs?
[7:39] - There are large volumes of both fraudulent and honest individuals creating and using synthetic IDs.
[9:25] - A lot of businesses are seeking verification from places like Jumio to protect themselves and their reputation.
[11:49] - Biometrics as a tool to use against fraudsters has grown globally.
[13:54] - Biometrics are very useful, but there are challenges.
[15:31] - Stuart shares a recent story about a fake video interaction that cost the victim millions of dollars.
[17:37] - At this point in the technology’s development, there are some signs of deep fakes that we can spot.
[19:03] - How can this negatively impact an individual?
[20:18] - Listen to your inner voice and check with another source before sending money.
[22:52] - You don’t have to be a programmer to use these tools. The creators have made them easy to use and people are using them to do harm.
[25:46] - The early versions of deep fake technology had a lot of easy-to-see abnormalities, but they are getting tougher to spot.
[27:26] - Although these negative impacts are concerning, there is some excitement about the positive uses of these advances.
[32:07] - What direction is verification headed when it comes to biometrics?
[33:54] - Documents have anatomy and security measures in place.
[36:43] - Most security systems are layered.
[40:00] - This landscape is continuously changing.