Analysis shows a 42% reduction in fraud by adding document liveness to identity verification

Tests by a global partner demonstrate how adding IDLive® Doc can stop significantly more attempts at fraud without adding user friction

ID R&D recently launched a product for document liveness detection called IDLive Doc. We’ve shared before how it helps secure digital onboarding processes that use documents for identity verification by detecting presentation attacks. With this article, we share test results that quantify the ability of IDLive Doc to enhance document authentication and detect substantially more attempted fraud–without adding user friction. 

IDLive Doc is used to analyze images of documents presented as proof of identity to determine if they’re not actually physically in the possession of an applicant, but rather a screen replay; a spoof of a document image displayed on a digital screen. Providers of identity verification solutions incorporate IDLive Doc into their platforms to enhance their fraud detection capabilities. Several of our partners have analyzed archived customer onboarding data and found that document spoofs were far more common than previously realized. 

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ID R&D has a large, global partner that provides an identity verification solution with the ability to detect forged and counterfeit documents, but document spoofs were still getting past their countermeasures. So they ran a large before-and-after test to quantify the effectiveness of IDLive Doc. The test used a representative sampling of nearly 100,000 images of passports and ID cards issued in over ten countries around the world, with the fraudulent document images identified as such by professional analysts. The results of the test show a 42% reduction in the number of fraudulent documents missed by countermeasures with IDLive Doc in use; in a real-world deployment that translates to 42% fewer fraudulent onboardings that would have otherwise been passed through the system. 

Importantly, the test showed that the rate at which legitimate documents were incorrectly classified as fraudulent did not change materially with the improvements in detecting fraud. These types of errors would make the onboarding process more frustrating for legitimate customers, causing abandonments just as applicants are about to open a new account. 

Helping to ensure that the security benefits of liveness detection do not come at the cost of the user experience is the fact that IDLive Doc is a purely passive, frictionless approach that does not introduce added steps for the applicant. The function simply performs another check to the image without any change in workflow or user interface. 

Document spoofs are among the easiest means to attempt fraud upon digital onboarding, yet detecting them remains among the bigger technical challenges in preventing fraud. It’s why companies are increasingly turning to products like IDLive Doc, which are explicitly designed to assess document liveness with such high accuracy and without adding friction for applicants. This most recent test shows just how effective and impactful it can be, with the potential to reduce document-related fraud by over 40% without affecting the onboarding experience for legitimate customers.