Impersonation fraud — where a cybercriminal pretends to be someone they aren’t in an attempt to make off with funds — gets a lot of attention, and for good reason. Cybercriminals are getting good enough to fake biometric authentication methods using Deep Fake and other techniques. Earlier this year, for example, fraudsters made off with $29 million from the U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s largest financial media organization, Nikkei, by successfully stealing a Nikkei executive’s actual voice to order the wire transfer.
It’s scary, GIACT CEO Melissa Townsley-Solis told Karen Webster in a recent conversation, because of the level of technological sophistication it implies. It’s also bold in that there is no way to miss that one has been ripped off for tens of millions of dollars on the strength of a good impersonation.
More insidious and much harder to track, Townsley-Solis told Webster, is synthetic ID fraud. In synthetic identity theft, she explained, the fraudster is still pretending to be someone they are not, but the difference is that they aren’t so much imitating an existing person as creating one. Starting with one or two pieces of real information (a Social Security number is always one of them, sometimes paired with a real name), fraudsters take their time to slowly nurture a fake credit profile until it has a good enough record to make a big strike.