This week we continue our series with our Not So Secret Crime Fighter, Onfido. We are diving into some sophisticated fraudulent document typologies, and looking at some controls that you can implement to make sure you don’t onboard these criminals.

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Counterfeit British Passports

Criminals were discovered opening bank accounts using British passports, where the passport numbers were from the series issued in the Channel Islands, while the documents themselves were said to have been issued on mainland Britain.

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The bank that discovered these criminals initially identified them using internal controls linking customers based on suspicious transactional data, which highlights the importance of investigating accounts thoroughly to uncover what methods have been used at each stage of the criminals’ lifecycle with you. It also shows the connection between different crime types. Criminals are not picky about the type of financial crime they carry out and those who onboard fraudulently may well be connected to money laundering or other suspicious activity later on.

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Onfido now enforces rules across all their customers based on the issuing authority and document number format to stop any of their other customers being exposed to this kind of fraud. In addition, staying on top of current typologies can help you keep your customer risk assessment up to date - ensuring your risk assessment is fluid and always evolving will mean you are able to stop more crime.

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Chinese Passports issued in London

A similar typology was seen with Chinese passports that were supposedly issued at the Chinese embassy in London. Chinese passports have a unique code in the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ), and the code for these passports did not match the unique code for London issued passports.

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Onfido’s rules, looking at the issuing authority and document numbers, helps to control for this typology. In addition, it might be worth spending more time reviewing Chinese documents issued in London because typologies are always changing. For example, there is a new adaptation of this typology using the new versions of Chinese passports currently hitting fintechs and banks.

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Sophisticated Counterfeit German Identity Cards

A particularly sophisticated counterfeit ID fraud was seen when criminals made fake German identity cards. These cards were made in photoshop with virtual images and virtual backgrounds, as well as the correct bespoke fonts that they had managed to reproduce exactly. Once the criminals had the template documents set up, they created lots of versions of the fake ID cards with the same faces, but different personal information.

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Once the typology was shared with banks, they were able to stop the criminals signing up by manually reviewing German ID cards. Another control that could be used here is to keep a blocklist of known faces connected to fraudulent documents.

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Thanks for reading our latest Secret Crime Fighters newsletter. If you have an interesting typology that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear about it! Please email us at [email protected].

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