January 2025 Summaries

A December 2024 survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers cited in Socure’s report identifies the Super Bowl as a major period for first-party fraud in online gaming, with risky transactions reportedly rising more than 206% over typical NFL playoff volumes. First-party fraud, in which individuals misuse their own identities or accounts for financial gain, includes disputing losing bets as unauthorized, coordinating payout manipulation, and using secondary accounts or software to evade restrictions. The report estimates that 1 in 10 Americans have disputed a losing sports wager, potentially representing $2.8 billion in annual industry losses based on an average disputed bet of $109, while online gaming accounted for 55% of first-party fraud incidents despite making up 15% of online transactions in 2024. Although many disputed bets are relatively small, frequent claims can accumulate into significant losses, with mobile casino and betting-platform fraud totaling $1.2 billion between 2022 and 2023, while also eroding trust and prompting stricter policies that may affect legitimate users.

Socure outlines plans to expand from an identity-verification provider into an AI-powered platform addressing identity, fraud, risk, and compliance across the customer lifecycle. Central to this strategy is RiskOS, scheduled to launch February 12 following the company’s acquisition of Effectiv, which combines Socure’s identity tools with orchestration and decisioning capabilities, more than 40 partner solutions, and AI-assisted workflow and model explainability. The company says its platform uses identity signals including personal data, geolocation, device information, behavior, phone ownership, and documents to support onboarding, authentication, payments, sanctions screening, AML, KYC and KYB, account recovery, age verification, and fraud prevention. Socure also claims that unifying nearly 20 internally developed offerings with partner tools through RiskOS will allow organizations to customize risk decisions without coding, reduce integration times by three to four months, and respond to changing customer risk profiles through ongoing monitoring and alerts.

Socure reports detecting more than 9,100 fraudulent checking-account and credit-card applications using stolen Massachusetts identities, which it says likely originated from a China-based actor. The applications showed coordinated indicators including randomly generated Outlook, Hotmail, and Luuinet.com email addresses unconnected to applicants’ identities, unusually high overnight U.S. application volumes that aligned with Chinese business hours, IP locations often far from claimed Massachusetts addresses, and inactive or recently reassigned Massachusetts phone numbers with weak identity links. Socure suggests the activity may be enabled by widespread data breaches affecting Massachusetts residents and believes the attackers use automated email creation, U.S. proxies, and locally coded phone numbers to evade detection. The company recommends that financial institutions monitor unusual patterns in application volume, domains, devices, IPs, and identity-contact correlations, and it highlights its own risk-scoring products, including an email “perplexity” model that it says identified the attack’s gibberish email addresses.

Call center fraud is increasing as criminals use stolen data, social engineering, synthetic identities, automation, device spoofing, and AI-generated voice or video to take over accounts, alter customer details, exploit recovery processes, and conduct high-value transactions. The resulting costs include direct financial losses, investigations, account restoration, compliance obligations, operational strain, customer friction, reputational damage, and churn. Traditional defenses such as knowledge-based authentication, manual reviews, siloed security tools, static rules, and single-point identity checks are described as inadequate because they lack cross-channel visibility and cannot adapt quickly to coordinated attacks. The proposed response is a proactive, layered security model combining real-time risk intelligence, behavioral and device analysis, identity resolution, automated decisioning, machine learning, and monitoring across phone, web, mobile, and social channels. Socure presents its platform as an integrated example of this approach, using identity, digital, behavioral, document, email, phone, and address-risk signals to detect fraud, support step-up verification, reduce manual reviews, and improve the experience for legitimate customers.