Verified?

Today, we just got done analyzing the confirmed fraud addresses from the United States Postal Inspection Service, which is the law enforcement agency of the Post Office. We went back and looked at all the confirmed fraud addresses over the past 12 months. In doing so, we categorized all of the records into the category of fraud.

What we found was that 48% of the confirmed frauds were due to re-shipping schemes and that 41% of the confirmed frauds were due to a fraudulent change of address. Together - they represent 89% of all confirmed frauds.

What is interesting is that for both of these cases, any ID Verification service would have very likely indicated that the Name Matched the Address! For fraudulent address changes - the fraud artist changed the address from the victim's address to an alternate address. This would then be picked up by the third party verification providers as a confirmed address change. In the second situation - unsuspecting "mules" would receive merchandise that was being shipped to the actual person listed at the address.

Point is - in both cases, any traditional ID Verification service would confirm that the name and address matched! Over the past few years - a culture has developed that when we "match" the name to address that it must be "good". This matching would be considered sufficient or "reasonable" to any examiner as meeting USA Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act or Fact Act guidelines. As we can see above - it isn't that simple. Makes you wonder?