In this edition:

• Exciting announcement from Incognia 🎉
• Trouble brewing for the doc + selfie IDV approach
• New videos, including user verification tips from StockX and Sittercity

Incognia closes $31M Series B funding round

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Incognia has closed a $31 million Series B funding round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. 🎉

This funding is a testament to our innovative approach, and it puts us in a great position to continue developing cutting-edge digital identity signals for many years to come.

Bessemer has a great track record of supporting trailblazing SaaS companies like Twilio, Shopify, Toast, and Auth0. It’s exciting for us to be listed next to these giants in the tech industry.

To learn more, you can read the press release here.

Here’s to continuing to build the future of fraud prevention! 🥂 

- The Incognia Team

Trouble brewing for the doc + selfie IDV approach

By André Ferraz, CEO and Co-Founder at Incognia
Recently I saw this article about GenAI making KYC useless:

This article focuses on a threat I’ve been talking about a lot: The rise of deepfakes.

So many companies base their user verification process on document and face scans.

If there’s a match, the user is verified. ✅

But creating a fake document was already easy a couple years ago, and it’s only gotten easier with GenAI.

And the facial recognition component? That’s less of a barrier for fraudsters now, too.

Most people have photos of their faces in a number of places online, especially on social media.

It’s easy for a fraudster to look someone up, get their picture, and use it to bypass facial recognition.

At this point, people in the facial recognition space would say, “Ah yes, but if you use liveness detection then you’re safe from that.”

No, you’re not.

The reality is, the GenAI tools fraudsters have access to have grown in sophistication very quickly. It’s important not to underestimate these tools. They can definitely bypass facial recognition even with liveness detection.

So where does that leave you?

Any identity verification method that’s based on using public information is extremely vulnerable right now.

The same applies to PII verification. Given the endless stream of new data breaches, let’s face it: Our PII data is essentially public data now.

Document verification, facial recognition, PII verification… these methods are all doomed due to the use of GenAI.

Sure, you can check the compliance box with one of these methods. But you won’t be preventing any fraud.

Any company that’s leveraging these techniques for fraud prevention needs to rethink their KYC and IDV approach right now.

New videos from Incognia

We regularly share insightful videos about fraud prevention on our website, on YouTube, and on LinkedIn. Here are a few recent highlights for you, including a clip on user verification from our recent webinar with StockX and Sittercity:

Other things to check out:

Incognia closes $31M Series B funding round

Incognia Secures $31MM to Meet Demand for Proactive Approach to Fraud Prevention

Trouble brewing for the doc + selfie IDV approach

GenAI could make KYC effectively useless | TechCrunch

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Incognia, a digital identity company, detects fake account creation and account takeover attempts for gig economy, marketplace, and financial technology applications. Benefits of using Incognia’s location-based digital identity include reduced false positives and a low friction user experience.