In early February, 2022, the Federal Reserve released a Synthetic Identity Fraud Mitigation Toolkit which offers a wide variety of informative resources for financial institutions, consumers and businesses on fraud mitigation. The issuance of the fraud mitigation toolkit is the next step in the Federal Reserve’s years-long commitment and engagement with fraud experts to support the payments industry in its battle against fraud.
According to the Federal Reserve’s blog post, synthetic identity fraud, where fraudsters create an identity out of pieces of real and/or fictitious information, resulted in an estimated $20 billion in losses (Off-site) for U.S. banks and financial institutions in 2020. The new toolkit will be expanded throughout the year, and provides useful insights and resources for identifying and mitigating synthetic identity fraud – specifically, to:
Increase education and awareness about synthetic identity fraud.
Enable the payments industry to better identify and fight synthetic identity fraud.
Foster payments industry collaboration on synthetic identity fraud mitigation.
The repository provides downloadable resources on a wide range of topics to financial institutions, consumers and businesses, including:
Synthetic Identity Fraud: The Basics – explains what synthetic identity fraud is, why you should care, and why fraudsters commit this type of fraud.
How Synthetic Identities are Used – describes what is hiding in your portfolio and how fraudsters use synthetics to commit fraud and increase their payouts.
When Synthetics Become a Reality – outlines examples of common synthetic use cases.
Detecting a Synthetic Identity – provides tools to help colleagues and consumers identify and prevent synthetic identity fraud.
Through future phases of the toolkit, new resources will be added over time and the toolkit will expand with a focus on the following:
Detecting, validating and identifying synthetic identities.
Next-level strategy, data and information sharing.
Read the full blog post here.
The toolkit can be accessed here.
