#identity-fraud

#identity-fraud

Outtake, founded in 2023 by a former Palantir engineer, Alex Dhillon, has found a way to automate what has largely been the manual problem of spotting and taking down digital identity posers: impersonation accounts, malicious domains posing as the company's, rogue apps, fraudulent ads, and more. This problem has grown even more difficult because AI has enabled attackers to be more convincing and faster in their efforts.

A former flight attendant accused of posing as a pilot and working airline employee fooled three U.S. carriers into giving him hundreds of free tickets over a span of four years, federal authorities say. But precisely how he is alleged to have done it - and why the airlines wouldn't have caught on sooner - has industry insiders scratching their heads.

No, it's not a scene from the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can, where Leonardo DiCaprio poses as a pilot to defraud an airline, but it might seem familiar. On Tuesday, the U.S Attorney General's Office for the District of Hawaii said that a Toronto man is accused of posing as a commercial pilot for four years, using a fake employee ID to take hundreds of free flights on three different airlines.

Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis (the latter being the US Army soldier) each pled guilty to one wire fraud conspiracy for providing their identities to North Koreans between 2019 and 2022 so the Norks could fraudulently get work at US companies. All three provided space in their homes for laptops issued by the companies they supposedly worked for and installed remote access software that allowed their North Korean comrades to appear to be working from the US, the DoJ said.

Fraudsters are increasingly using generative AI. Deepfake video calls and synthetic identities have become more realistic at record speed. 77 percent of anti-fraud professionals have seen a clear acceleration in the past two years. But most feel ill-prepared. This is according to research by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and SAS. Modern analysis techniques can recognize suspicious patterns and transactions in real time. Network analytics exposes hidden relationships that are barely visible to humans.

It is 21 years since Tony Blair's government made proposals for an ID card system to tackle illegal working and immigration, and to make it more convenient for the public to access services. The same issues are on the agenda again as Keir Starmer revives what became one of New Labour's most controversial policies. He is about to find out if he can defeat the argument that David Cameron's Conservatives

I found out that someone within a friend group completely faked being a student at a relatively prestigious university in the area. Nobody had a clue. He basically came and hung out with people and pretended that he also attended classes. He had actually dropped out of school years ago. He'd even pretended that he graduated and had attended the ceremony.

The internet was built to connect machines, not people. Its basic architecture maps servers to domain names and uses cryptographic certificates to prove websites are authentic. Yet it lacks a built-in way to bridge the gap between our offline identities - citizen, taxpayer, patient, employee, student - and the digital systems on which we increasingly rely to conduct our economic, civic, and personal lives.

A former U.S. Postal Service letter carrier was sentenced on Monday, Sept. 8, to five and a half years in federal prison for stealing over $10 million in checks from the mail, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Rashad Deon Stolden, a 34-year-old Huntington Beach man, worked in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles. From 2020 to 2024, he stole mail with high-value checks and debit cards from the California Employment Development Department, the agency that handles unemployment and disability benefits, according to the DOJ.

The digital ID systems currently being introduced potentially solve problems like identity fraud for business and government services, but leave the holder of the digital ID vulnerable to the needs of the companies collecting such information.