Episode Transcript
Bill Roth: Hello and welcome, Everybody, to the third episode of the Intellicheck podcast. I'm your host, Bill Roth. This is the show where we delve into the news and issues around identity verification, identity fraud, and the tools needed to combat it.
This week, the topic is employment verification and identity theft. And we're going to discuss a new blog that'll be in the show notes that's on the Intellicheck website. And with us this week is the author of that blog, Intellicheck CEO Bryan Lewis. Welcome, Bryan.
Bryan Lewis: Thanks for having me.
Bill Roth: So, employment verification, we all got to do it. We all got to fill out our I-9s, but apparently it's pretty easy to fake.
How serious a problem is this?
Bryan Lewis: Look, I think it's a large issue, and we're certainly seeing it with the current administration and what they're doing and going into companies and saying, are these people really valid and should they be working here then? There's also a whole cottage industry out there of folks selling, say, their Uber license, their DoorDash license, their GoPuff license, whatever it is, in the same way that people used to rent out taxi medallions.
So do we know two things. Is the person actually driving me or delivering stuff, the person that was hired?
And secondly, are the people that are working for us really who they say they are?
And I say kind of hit close to home with us in that the niece of my CTO, a nurse, somebody stole her credentials and got hired as a nurse. Right? That's kind of scary.
Bill Roth: Yeah.
Bryan Lewis: Can you imagine having a medical professional taking care of you who is not a medical professional?
So making sure that you are who you say you are when you get hired for a job, I think is really important.
Bill Roth: Now, in the article, you talk about sort of the gateway to employment verification fraud. Tell us, tell us more about what is, what is the gateway that makes all this possible.
Bryan Lewis: Look, there's plenty of things I've. I've seen so many articles about how you can go on, say, the Facebook marketplace and find out how to get your fake id, a fake bank account, how to get again, somebody is going to lease you there their app to do whatever delivery it is and and honestly, it all begins with the fact that getting a fake ID that will fool most people is really simple. Right? You know, it's $40. You're done. You're in.
Most of us are not trained on how to look at a license and figure out well, wait a minute. The holograms are in the right place. It's really hard to do.
Law enforcement has a hard time with it. So how is the person who's running HR and then particularly in this remote workforce world, how do I do that remotely? Right. Okay, great. I got a picture of your license. How do I make sure that's real?
So having systems in place that allow you to authenticate government-issued, particularly in the US and Canada, DMV-issued documents, having that be simple, frictionless and fast is a good way to make sure that you know who you're hiring.
Bill Roth: So you bring up the point about obviously how easy it is to steal an ID and fake IDs. We're going to have an episode coming up on that and it's a terrifying topic.
What are some of the best practices to avoid getting hit with if you're an employer with getting hit with false employment verification?
Bryan Lewis: Well, I think the most important thing is can you verify whatever the government document that they're bringing into you to say, hey, this is Brian, right again. You know, I've got, I love my stacks of all these fakes that I get.
These all look super real. You know, I have a bunch of fakes from my state and my real one from my state and sort of a parlor trick like put them out as when I'm traveling at the, in the bar, an airport, and say people pick them out.
Nobody's better than 50 in figuring out what's real and what is not. So that's sort of the game that you're playing. You're hoping now there's technology that will allow you to make sure that this is in fact real or is not right. And the thing that I always point out to everybody is just because that barcode will scan does not mean it's real. Every single fake that I have will scan. Every single website where you can buy a fake will say they will scan.
So you need the right technology.
And it also makes it easier for an employee because not only when you scan to see that it's real, you pull out all the data. You can fill out any application you want.
It's simple, quick and effective because it makes it easier for the person you're looking to hire and protects you as the employer.
Bill Roth: Great advice. So talk about Intellicheck. How does Intellicheck protect customers from this false employment verification? I know you've got kind of a mobile app. You've got a direct way of doing it. It's pretty Simple. But tell folks just how easy it is for them to do this.
Bryan Lewis: Oh, we work with, again, mobile app, web apps, APIs.
We're incorporated into systems that currently some background check companies already use.
Again, what I'd say is I will bet that a ton of people listening to this have gone through our process because we're in 30,000 retail locations, about 12,000 bank, bank branches, applying for a loan, applying for an apartment, going into an auto dealership, and having them scan your license. You've probably gone through us. We're just behind the scenes, right? Nobody knows it's us because it's simple, that easy, that quick. And we have proprietary knowledge about the driver's license barcode that allows us to be as accurate as we are.
You know, I was talking to one of our channel partners in the automotive space, and we figured out that we were running at a rate of 99.996% accurate in checking and finding fakes.
Bill Roth: And I think that's interesting because my understanding is some of the other folks out there aren't anywhere near that now.
Bryan Lewis: Because most of what they are doing because they don't have this proprietary knowledge about the barcode that we have is they are saying they take a photo of the front and compare it to a template. Oh, everything's in the right spot.
But that's exactly what machine learning AI can do very, very simply.
And that's why these licenses are so good that our law enforcement customers tell us they're having a hard time figuring out just by looking at it, which is why they use us.
Bill Roth: Excellent.
Well, that's all the time we have today.
My guest today on the Intellicheck podcast has been Intellicheck CEO Bryan Lewis, and we've been discussing the issues surrounding employment verification. Thanks very much.
Bryan Lewis: Thank you.
Bill Roth: Be sure to check out the show notes in the description, where we'll have a list of the articles mentioned as well as some of the data.
If you want more information on how to engage with Intellicheck, don't forget to go to Intellicheck.com and there's a big demo button and send that in and we'll get somebody on that right away. Thanks for listening to the Intellicheck podcast.
See you next time. And until then, stay safe out there.
