As technology advances, imposters are increasing their bad tactics by finding more ways to deceive people in every industry, specifically in the internet world. In the U.S. cybercrime cases, specifically online fraud, have risen from 647,000 to 800,000 between 2019 and 2022. People lose money, and businesses sometimes exit the industry due to scamming. Then, what solution can restrict them and help firms grow and improve productivity? The document verification process – an essential core of Know Your Customer (KYC) and helps firms achieve their goal and increase revenue.
Let’s take a close look at how the document verification process works.
What is Verification of Document – A Brief Summary
Verification of documents confirms if the document is authentic and presented by a real person. The document includes business reports, bank statements, and employment records. Compared to other verification methods, document verification is considered exceptional due to its authenticity. It’s an online process that confirms if the user is real or fake and works in this manner:
- During the account-making procedure, the customer provides information about themselves that varies from business to business, including address, name, date of birth, and SSN.
- Then, the system asked the user to provide current documents to verify the information provided. For instance, some documents may be required to confirm the people’s date of birth and age.
- The system will recognize instantly if the document provided is genuine and not fake.
- If the person is genuine, it will be verified by the system and if not the alarm will be sent to the employer that a scammer is detected.
Functioning of Online Document Verification Systems
On a number of factors, an online document verification solution depends on the document types in which firms deal and the industry in which they operate. It has four steps, including data collection, its extraction, authentication, and traditional verification.
Let’s delve into them one by one to have a closer look:
- Collection
Organically, the primary step in document verification is to collect it, and this can be done in different ways as it usually asks people to take and upload single or multiple document images. The documents are pre-processed and investigated by users after they submit all required essentials to meet the business requirements. This verification process ensures that the image is of quality and the document is complete or partial. Some obvious signs are that documents have all the necessary information and aren’t forged or tampered with. The system automatically rejects if the document has any signs of manipulation or forgery and allows the genuine user to after passing the procedure.
- Extraction
After a user passes the data collection step, the system starts extracting essential information from documents and stores user identity in different portions. Let’s suppose a national ID card have name, image and other information. The system will extract this information This can be done through optical character recognition (OCR) and pattern recognition.
Users can upload any utility bill and house address as proof that will be compared against the information instilled by the system. Hence, differences between data contained and user-supplied data can create issues that can be due to input error and any fraud.
- Validation
By resolving previous issues, the following process must confirm if the user is genuine and isn’t involved in any kind of fraud. It can be done through different kinds of validity checks, including:
- Completion: let’s suppose that any document has multiple pages and the system requires updating every page.
- Edge Cropping and Detection: Analyze if the document edge is tampered with or has to be cropped.
- Colorspace Analysis: Image lighting, shadow, and color provide further context that portrays whether the document is real or fake.
- Identify Unique Feature: Many official documents are difficult to replicate including government issued ID cards, including stamps, fonts, holograms and textures.
- Traditional Verification
If the system can’t determine whether the document is forged or real, businesses can use traditional methods of identification. They can reject the document or simply review it. However, this system is less secure and efficient, so manual review is challenging for firms.
Final Words
Scammers are getting sophisticated with the advent of advanced technology as they have found more ways to deceive firms and individuals. However, AI researchers introduced verification solutions, including a document verification process. This is helpful for companies in many ways,
including restricting scammers to increase overall productivity. Verification of documents is now essential in almost every industry, from healthcare to gambling.