$200m Credit Card Fraud – Quiser Khan and Shafique Ahmed Enter Guilty Plea

Six out of eighteen defendants; Quiser Khan, Shafique Ahmed, Muhammad Shafiq, Mohammad Khan, Vernina Adams and Raghbir Singh have all entered guilty pleas to the accusation of the creation of over 7,000 identities in order to create 25,000 credit cards.

The credit card fraud and mass money-laundering scheme utilized over 169 foreign and domestic bank accounts. The gang used the accounts to steal and launder over $200 million dollars of banks’ money. The operation was highly organised and managed to evade detection for over ten years.

Know your Customer Policies

The report outlines how identity verification, specifically ‘Know your Customer Policies’ are enacted by the banks and the credit agencies which are intended to verify is the applicant customer is who they said they are, are very lax.

Behaviour Analytics

Behaviour analytics is usually used to protect against account takeover and account hijacking. However it can also be utilised by banks and credit agencies to combat application fraud. Usually behaviour is monitored during an ecommerce purchasing process or through normal spending, however, as more application systems move online and telephone numbers tied to online VOIP services as opposed to physical addresses, traditional verification systems will continue to degrade.

How Behavioral Analytics makes a difference

To create 7,000 applications for credit cards, the users are having to repeat the same behaviours and processes. In this sense, the crime is very similar to New Account Fraud, something behaviour analytics has been focussed on for many years. Solutions such as NuDetect, recognize and recording behaviour patterns of any type, whether bad or good.

What this means is that if a new type of fraud is spotted, the behaviour pattern can be retroactively investigated – quickly gathering a backlog of other suspicious applications that may be considered fraud.

Behaviour analytics systems are self learning, so as fraudulent behaviour is recognized, a banks system can react in real-time. Often this is an invisible countermeasure such as manual review or dynamically adding more steps into the account creation workflow – requiring more documentation or presence at a physical branch.

What this case has highlighted is how much banks and credit agencies are playing a cat and mouse game, as opposed to working out how to detect fraud in real time.

Find out more about application fraud or contact us for details of our behaviour analytics solutions.