Selfie biometrics tailored to different sectors but must defend against fraud and lawsuits

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FaceFirst, Retail

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Innovatrics presents a use case, AuthID nabs a new deal and another BIPA lawsuit has been filed over selfie biometrics in the U.S.

Innovatrics examines its love affair with ride-hailing platforms

Innovatrics has published a case study examining how ride-hailing apps helped improve its products, including its digital onboarding tool DOT.

Ride-hailing companies onboard drivers through biometric verification and have plenty of real-life experience in detecting identity fraud. Drivers who are banned from platforms for transgressions sometimes attempt to sidestep the bans by presenting someone else’s ID and fake images.

Selfie-to-ID verification and liveness detection are part of the company’s DOT tool, which extracts data and performs registration, facial comparison and liveness checks. Innovatrics has had to adapt the product to read a wide range of documents from different countries.

“In response, we delivered the algorithm to only look for the face portrait and omit the document reading. It makes the whole process easier and faster,” says Viktor Bielko, Innovatrics product manager for DOT.

AuthID secures another deal

AuthID has signed a reseller agreement with identity and access management company IDMWorks. The company will offer AuthID’s biometric and document-based identity verification to its workforce and customer identity clients in North America, including businesses in the financial, healthcare and supply chain industries.

The two companies have been working together since 2004.

AuthID recently secured a deal with the U.S. National Notarial Centralized Verification System (NNCVS) and announced cooperation with 1-click onboarding provider Verified Inc.

U-Haul hit with BIPA over selfie verification

The latest company to be slapped with a BIPA suit is truck and trailer rental company U-Haul.

U-Haul has been requiring customers to verify their identities with a facial scan during the lease signing process. The class action lawsuit claims that the company violated the stringent Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by not securing written consent for the face scanning nor explaining what happens to the data that was gathered.

The suit was brought to the Cook County Circuit Court by a U-Haul customer named Patricia Cole, The Cook Country Chronicle reports.

The state of Illinois is currently seeing a bill to amend BIPA pass through its legislature. The amendments would limit fines for procedural violations which could damage small businesses. Meanwhile, cases under the legislation continue to pile on.

Selfie spoofing driving rise in fraud

According to a recent report from Socure, fraud surrounding ID documents accounted for 70 percent of all fraudulent verifications evaluated by the company’s document verification tool. Biometric-related fraud “made up 30 percent of all fraudulent captures we saw, which was evenly split between selfie spoofing and impersonations, and a mismatch between the headshot on the ID and the selfie.” Almost half of all selfie spoofing attacks were found to target users 50 and above.

According to the report, Idaho and New Hampshire rank as the top two states with the highest verification rejection rates. The company expects the selfie-spoofing trend to continue , as cheap and easy to find AI and deepfake tools lower the barriers to use by fraudsters.