• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 24, 2018

As brands head into 2019, marketers should consider strategies to protect consumers' data and their reputation. Trust plays a major factor in the relationship between brands and customers. Data breaches in the coming year are a danger to both.

Seasonal fraud affects more industries than just retail and ecommerce. Cryptocurrency saw an attempted ID fraud rate increase of 40.3%, while online services rose 28.7% and financial services rose 9.69% in 2018, according to Jumio, which uses technology to verify a person's identify by connecting their online information to their physical identity.

Dean Nicolls, vice president of marketing at Jumio, is calling on brands to increase the number of checks and balances when accepting credit cards and government-issued IDs during a purchase. He calls this “identity proofing.”

Online companies often bolster the number of users on their site because it shows growth, so many count fraudulent user profiles. Intentionally or not, there is little incentive to weed out bogus identities. There is an incentive to show high numbers to a company's board and advertisers, Nicolls said.

It’s not easy to verify a government-issued ID from an online consumer. The merchant can verify the credit card, but how do they confirm the person’s identity making the purchase or booking the hotel room? Jumio’s technology can verify and match the picture in the selfie to the picture in the driver’s license to reduce the percentage of cases where the ID is manipulated or tampered.

The second edition of Jumio’s Holiday ID Fraud Report compares ID fraud patterns in 2018 from millions of transactions as early as 2014. The data analysis found that this year, fraud hit a five-year high between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Nicolls said verification takes less than 60 seconds.

“After all the recent data breaches, it begs the question why aren’t companies requiring additional verification for online transactions?” he asked, since the brand’s reputation is at stake. “Every time there is a data breach, a little more of our personal data gets exposed to the dark web.”

With each data breach, a little more of that data is acquired by bad guys, who can perform account takeovers or create synthetic identifies.

According to the data, ID fraud rates were the highest in India at 4.30%, China at 1.54%, and Italy at 1.52%.

In 2018, online gambling had the highest rate of attempted ID fraud at 3.45%, a significantly higher rate than the 1.72% global average.