Who needs one API to trust fearlessly anyway?

The world has changed over the past few years. One of the things that has gotten worse is a generational surge in superpowered AI fraud.

Fraud is already the most common crime in the UK, and it has now been industrialised.

You can use free and cheap tools to change the details on documents, mock up completely new fakes, and even use AI agents with minimal guardrails to lay plausible traces of completely made-up identities around the web.

There’s also a roaring trade in the buying and selling of accounts that already have a proven identity attached to them, so they can be used for things like handling stolen funds.

Attitudes to fraud are also changing.

New laws like the Online Safety Act meant thousands of businesses had to put proper identity and age checks in overnight and suddenly start soliciting millions of people for pictures of their passports.

Taking a security measure that would have only been part of applying for a mortgage or visa ten years ago and making it something that you have to do to join a dating app greatly reduces the perceived danger of trying to get around it.

This is how we end up with teens boasting about defeating age checks with endless low-tech measures, and sharing what they’ve learned faster than vendors can keep up.

People are starting to wake up to the fact that just taking a picture of a driving licence never really offered genuine security.

Who is at risk?

The effort of sophisticated fraud meant that it used to need to be a big, juicy, lucrative target to justify the effort. These days, AI puts in that effort, so small businesses are equally at risk.

So, monitoring your customers for signs of fraud is no longer just something large enterprises need to do.

Banks yes, but also local credit unions, ecommerce websites, any kind of marketplace or community that cares about trust and safety. Every online business is at risk.

How can we benefit from herd immunity?

The Bank of England and the FCA have both recently called shared fraud intelligence an underused tool in our arsenal.

If your business is the victim of fraud, you probably aren’t the first.

A really common pattern when an identity is stolen is to try the details in a lot of places all at once, and see what you can get away with before the theft is spotted.

Equally, the same biometrics presented under a different name, or the same name under many addresses, clearly suggest someone is trying to craft a fake identity.

Most businesses never reach a big enough scale where they can spot these things reliably just by looking at their own records.

Antivirus software wouldn’t be very useful if it had to learn what a virus looked like from scratch every time one appeared on your computer. Instead, you get virus definitions from the cloud, and are protected by herd immunity.

Great swathes of the economy and daily life now involve strong age, address and identity checks.

So why isn’t the fraud intelligence that goes along with them shared? Why are we all stuck learning what fraud looks like from first principles every time?

How are we solving the problem?

Vouchsafe has spent years helping countless regulated businesses confidently verify those who are traditionally hard to verify.

We are doing it using cutting edge digital evidence and official data, rather than just old fashioned document scans.

Over that time, we’ve become experts in spotting the pre-existing fraud flags, unusual velocity signals and mismatches that point to identity theft or entirely made-up identities.

Now, we’re offering all that knowledge out as a single API endpoint that gets smarter every time you call it.

It’s a real-time fraud intelligence sharing network.

When you check a set of customer details, we will give you an instant risk assessment and recommendation of what to do next. 

We will also proactively alert you if that risk ever rises, whether due to a fraud report or a detected anomaly.

When you start using Vouchsafe’s APIs, you join a real-time consortium of your fellow businesses, all automatically contributing to the threat intelligence to keep each other safe.

So, who needs one API to trust fearlessly anyway?

Everyone, it turns out.

Vouchsafe is the real-time fraud intelligence-sharing network for the AI era. Book a conversation or get a free 14 day trial.