Embrace friction and don’t be a target for fraudsters!
We live in a world where everything is designed to eliminate friction. If you don’t like to cook, no problem, you can simply order your food from Uber or Skip the Dishes. Don’t like to shop in person for groceries or clothes no worries you can simply order online. Need to pay a bill, just access your online bank account. In our desire to make everything convenient and frictionless we have also made it very easy for cybercriminals to target us.
As I’ve mentioned previously, cybercrime is estimated to be at $8 trillion USD, which makes it the world’s 3rd largest economy behind the U.S. and China. It’s a scary number that all of us should be worried about. It’s easy to just hope we don’t get hacked but if we want to stop cybercrime, we need to be willing to embrace some friction.
One of the simple ways you can stop hackers is by using strong unique passwords for every online account you use, yet we continue to see people using one short password for everything. There are people that are simply not aware that this is an issue, but I’ve encountered many people who are aware but don’t make the necessary password changes because its not convenient and they figure they are not a hacking target.
This same thinking applies to identity verification technology. Not all identity verification technology is the same. We built Treefort IDV to make it easy for our clients to comply with FINTRAC and Law Society client ID rules, but we also built our system to combat identity fraud which does add some friction to the IDV process. We did this because we believe that just having a compliance tool is not good enough for our clients given the significant rise in identity fraud.
I am sure many of you may remember the news stories last year about legitimate homeowners having their homes sold out from under them by fraudsters. What you may not be aware of is that these criminals were so confident in their fake ID they met in person with mortgage brokers and lawyers not all online as you would expect. It also confirmed for me that we were on the right track to create an IDV system that adds some friction to the IDV process to combat identity fraud.
So, I encourage you to embrace more friction in your life when it comes to cybersecurity.
Kim Krushell, Co-Founder
