Seven years ago, two twentysomething data scientists spotted a novel phenomenon: synthetic identity fraud. They turned that discovery into fast-growing SentiLink, a member of the Fintech 50 for 2023.
During the summer and fall of 2018, Hasan Hakim Brown, a Floridian in his early 40s, was applying online for loans—for the fake companies and bogus identities he’d set up. He had mixed success. He swindled more than $1 million from a Texas bank. But a few of his other targets, using software from San Francisco–based startup SentiLink, flagged his applications as suspicious because too many Social Security numbers were associated with the same address.
Brown, it turned out, had started manufacturing “synthetic identities”—stolen (but real) Social Security numbers merged with made-up names. He later refined his technique, buying a rig from an Atlanta computer consultant that let him simultaneously manage multiple virtual desktops from different IP addresses, thereby evading certain fraud-detection screens.
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