Using a fake ID has gone well beyond underage college students trying to get served in a bar. In fact, according to the FBI, identity theft has outpaced the drug trade as the most costly U.S. crime. Last year alone, identity thieves got their hands on a record 60 million pieces of personal ID.
Dealers are starting to see a rise in fake IDs being given for test drives, which can result in stolen cars or cars actually being purchased using someone else’s information.
Though it is not known exactly how much of a percentage dealer fraud accounted for last year, “we’ve found that it’s a growing issue and a growing concern,” DealerCentric Solutions Chief Executive Pete MacInnis told Auto Finance News last week. “For example, one of our household-name rental-car agencies had 47 vehicles stolen from one of our highest-profiled airports by a Russian mob using fake identifications to rent the vehicles and never returned them.”
As a way to combat fraudulent activity at dealerships, DealerCentric Solutions recently unveiled a new product called ID Drive, which is a scanner system that goes above the capability of the barcode scanner dealers currently use. The barcode scanner can only verify the data presented on the drivers’ license, while ID Drive can authenticates the document’s validity as a true government-issued document and performs 50 forensic tests for more than 2,500 global ID types in less than six seconds.
Some of those tests include making sure that the drivers’ license is the correct version of a state’s license, that the barcode information on the back matches the information on the front of the document, and even if the font size and type matches those designated by that particular state, “things the human eye would never, ever be able to detect,” said MacInnis, left. “We also electronically tie it to the salesperson in the dealership and the vehicle they’re going to test drive. It’s an electronic footprint.”
Oftentimes, red-flag issues usually happens toward the end of a car-buying transaction, when a consumer is sitting down in the F&I department. By using ID Drive, MacInnis estimates that 85% of red-flag issues can be snuffed out before a consumer even gets behind the wheel for a test drive, which benefits the consumer, the dealer, and the lender.
“A consumer isn’t going to want someone buying a car in their name,” MacInnis explained. “The dealer certainly doesn’t want a car disappearing, and [because a dealer is] getting better identification upfront, when lenders purchase that contract from that dealer, there’s a lot more confidence that the dealer’s done their job from a compliance standpoint and assuring that that person who financed that car is who they say they are and live where they say they live.”
DealerCentric and development partner AssureTec Technologies created ID Drive using the same technology AssureTec provides to Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, police departments, and more to verify identity. About 15 dealers across the country beta-tested the platform, and DealerCentric plans to roll it out to another 30 dealerships within the next few weeks.
