SentiLink and eCBSV

All of us at SentiLink are excited to announce that we were selected by the Social Security Administration to be part of the new eCBSV program, starting in June 2020. eCBSV (“Electronic Consent Based SSN Verification”) will allow us to help financial institutions verify whether the SSA has a record of the name, DOB, and SSN of their customers. This will help to prevent synthetic fraud, where a fraudster attempts to open an account with an identity that doesn’t belong to a real person.

While this is a big step forward, it’s not the first time that the SSA has allowed the private sector limited access to its records or the first time that we’ve worked with them. Since November 2008, the SSA has run the CBSV program (note the lack of “e” in the name), allowing organizations that obtain a physical SSA-89 form to verify this same information with the SSA. We began processing these physical forms on behalf of our partners shortly after SentiLink’s inception. Rather, the new eCBSV program is so exciting because it only requires financial institutions to obtain electronic consent, significantly streamlining the process.

With ordinary CBSV, if we suspect that the identity on an application is not real, we or our partners need to request that the applicant print out an SSA-89 form, fill in their name, DOB, and SSN and sign it with a pen, and then snail-mail it in. After receiving the form, we can then check whether the SSA has a record of this identity. Needless to say, this is a painful multiple-day process, and a bad customer experience. eCBSV will instead allow the customer to electronically provide consent, replacing this multiple-day, offline process with an online process that takes seconds.

eCBSV will be a significant help to us and the financial services industry in our fight against synthetic fraud. That said, since starting SentiLink, we’ve repeatedly seen fraudsters evolve their tactics to sidestep new industry measures or to exploit other weaknesses in the system. We would be unsurprised if fraudsters started trying to get the SSA to issue real SSNs to their synthetic identities by submitting fraudulent SS-5 forms — after all each successful synthetic identity can net the fraudster over $100,000.

Overall though, this is a very welcome development. We’re thrilled to be part of this landmark rollout and look forward to a new chapter in helping the industry stop synthetic fraud.