A great article by Hannah Lutz appeared in Automotive Times this week about the growing problem of synthetic identity fraud.

You can check out the article here – The Growing Problem of Synthetic Identity Fraud

The real danger to synthetic identity is the fact that they can flow through a lenders approval process and get “auto approved” since the loans appear to be from borrowers with good credit scores and great credit history.

Synthetic identities can “flow through the auto approval process in some cases rather seamlessly,” said Steve Bowman, chief credit and risk officer for GM Financial. The captive has developed proprietary technology to detect and prevent synthetic identity fraud. Suspicious data are pulled “out of the underwriting process and put into a more intense underwriting process, where we can do more verifications, gather more information and slow the transaction down,” Bowman said. “We have been successful in [stopping] quite a bit of synthetic identity fraud.”

Zahid Kassem with Santander also discusses in the article what they are doing with Synthetic Identity theft – leveraging both internal and external data to detect it.

Santander Consumer USA is using the tool along with strategies to verify identity using internal and external data, said Zahid Kassem, senior vice president of enterprise fraud.