Imposter: The Rise of NextGen Fraudulent Impersonation
Fake apps, deepfakes, the Russian state, and more. This Week in Fraud Trends, June 28, 2019.
Much of the success of modern fraudsters has to do with impersonation — the ability to simulate online legitimacy with such precision that it becomes nearly impossible to discern the real accounts from the fraudulent ones.
In general, when we think of impersonation, we tend to focus on the “person” contained within the word: im-person-ation. Identify theft comes to mind, as do synthetic identities — fake user profiles built from real user data. We might also think of techniques like device emulation and GPS spoofing — techniques that allow fraudsters to appear legitimate.
It’s important to remember, however, that impersonation goes beyond people. Fake emails, fake websites, and fake apps, for example. They may not be people, but they behave like human grifters all the same, as they trick you into giving them your valuables.
Hard to believe apps steal from you, isn’t it? Well, they do, and in a big way, apparently. From The Next Web this week, we learned just how serious a problem this really is:
“According to new research, Google’s Play Store is riddled with thousands of possible malware-ridden counterfeit apps and games.”
Sometimes, it’s in the everyday hustle and bustle of modern life that the most dangerous things lurk. After all, we buy and use apps all the time, and it’s hard to believe we’re being preyed on as we do it. But there’s no doubt we pay a price for the ease and convenience online affords us.
Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to online finance. Forbes this week shared some sobering news about our activities on Venmo:
“Last year, Hang Do Thi Duc downloaded 207 million transactions. She was able to track lifestyle trends and determine information about people’s entire lives just based on their transaction data. In one instance, she was able to determine that two users who frequently made transactions with one another were a married couple in San Diego who owned a car and a dog and had recently taken the dog to the vet. She was able to distinguish that they shopped weekly for groceries at Walmart, were paying off a loan and frequently ordered pizza.”
The above probably sounds both creepy, and not all that threatening. Yes, it’s weird that a stranger can find out how often you order pizza by scraping your data online. But after all, it’s just pizza.
Turns out, however, that payment fraud is a much bigger deal. MUCH bigger, as we learned from Infosecurity this week:
“The report detailed specific examples of stolen payment card data being used in criminal activity, including by Russian gangs, Sri Lankan criminals, Hezbollah, al Qaeda and even the Russian state.”
This is scary stuff. Especially when you realize that activity like this is taking place simultaneous to the rise of deepfakes — something The Atlantic wrote about this week:
“Using new computing techniques, deepfakes can create quite realistic and convincing video and audio of people saying and doing things that they have not.”
This is fraudulent impersonation at a whole new level.
The moral of all these stories is that fraudsters are voracious, omnivorous, intelligent, and adaptive. If they were animals, they’d be evolutionary miracles. Chameleon-like, they blend into normalcy, becoming almost impossible to spot.
Fortunately, no matter how sophisticated they get, there is one thing a fraudster cannot do — they cannot walk on digital air. They must leave a digital footprint wherever they go, and with the power of AI and machine learning, we can find them. DataVisor Co-Founder and CEO Yinglian Xie wrote about this in her contribution to the recently published Innovation Ripple Effect eBook from PYMNTS. She discussed the issue we raised earlier in this post, about the price we pay for online convenience, and connected this theme to the augmentative powers of artificial intelligence:
“The more we optimize for ease of use, the harder it is to maintain effective levels of scrutiny when it comes to fraud prevention. The wider we open the door to our modern economy, the more room we make for bad actors to enter alongside law-abiding digital citizens. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning give us new powers to build and maintain a safe financial world, but these technologies are accessible to fraudsters as well. For every positive, there is seemingly a corresponding threat to address.”
And so the battle royale continues, between the fraudsters and those who would stop them. Tune in next week for a new edition of This Week in Fraud Trends, to see who gets the upper hand!
