Identifying Portions of Employer Names that Frequently Appear on Fraudulent Loan Applications
Point Predictive’s unique proprietary data repository gives me detailed fraud insights in my role as Senior Fraud Analyst. In recent months, I’ve been leaning heavily on our AI modeling technology to locate clusters of synthetic identity and other suspicious application details and then group by employer name, phone number, or address. Sometimes, I discover one suspicious application and then “pull on the thread”, which unravels related clusters of fraudulent loan attempts.
We’re constantly discovering patterns like this one, which is found in the “employer name” field of credit applications. It can be hard to explain in words, but simply looking at this list reveals a pattern.
It’s clear that fraudsters think that, in order to fool the lender, the misrepresented employer either needs to sound as general and watered down as can be (“enterprises” or “consulting”) or perhaps a business that might not have any process for verifying employment — or perhaps can be leveraged to fraudulently verify non-existent employment (“trucking” or “credit repair”).
The risk exposure doesn’t lie.
- “Transportation” and “Trucking” has been used on nearly $5 million in loan exposure so far in 2021.
- “Solutions” is associated with over $5 million year-to-date.
- “LLC” defies most rational assumptions about volume. We have seen some three-person LLCs associated with more auto loan applications than some Fortune 500 companies across our industry group.
The Point Predictive fraud analyst group identifies and analyzes over $15.5 million worth of loan applications each week that have suspicious employment stated. There’s a lot of misrepresentation out there. Industry collaboration and data science are our tools to keep this risk at bay.
Justin Hochmuth is a Senior Fraud Analyst here at Point Predictive. He’s always up for a chat!
