There’s not much you can’t get on the dark web; it’s a lawless haven for cybercriminals. As businesses continue to utilise increasingly stringent identity checks, fraudsters will always be trying to get one step ahead.

Currently on sale on the dark web are passport scans. For just £55 you can get a typical passport scan with accompanying selfie. If the scan is real or forged, they often come with other forms of identification such as a utility bill, which of course hikes the price up a bit. And even if you’ve yet to figure out how to access the dark web, just a few months ago you could have popped over to an Arabic Facebook page called European Passports for Sale and pick up forgeries on sale from £800 to £2,600.

It can be very easy for these forgeries to slip through the identity verification net when a business is checking on their customers, as a lot of commercially available solutions are not able to verify if a scanned passport is a counterfeit.

What can significantly help is the use of artificial intelligence in your processes. Solutions exist that will analyse the document image down to the smallest part, the sub-pixel area. By checking on the optical features as well as the material properties, the program can determine if the properties match those of a real document. Combine this with liveness detection and you have a lethal combination for the fraudsters’ intentions. They are quick learners and will go and find a business that doesn’t have such stringent checks in place. These solutions are designed for minimal customer friction, to ensure you don’t lose your customers to lengthy and cumbersome checks.

Where this is a will, there is a way, and fraudsters will always try and find new ways to stay ahead of the fraud prevention solutions. Our job is to make it as hard as possible, to use new and innovative ways to prevent them from de-frauding our businesses.