Dos and Don’ts of ID Review

Instant and automated document ID verification solutions are one of the ways that businesses can verify someone’s government-issued ID– deterring fraudsters and helping ensure bad actors don’t gain access to sensitive information or finances. And, because they’re automated, many businesses rely on these solutions to automatically accept or reject IDs. 

In our experience, however, ID verification isn’t always so cut and dry.

Why would someone’s government-issued ID get auto-rejected?

Despite a business’ best efforts, there will always be customers who find registering for their service confusing or frustrating. And when customers are confused, they may not know how to show their ID or may incorrectly input critical information that would cause their ID to get auto-rejected. For example, a customer could misalign their ID when trying to capture an image of it and miss half of the barcode on the back of a license, or they might take a really blurry picture where the information on the ID isn’t legible and not know how to retake a better one. Customers could also mistakenly misspell their name or birthdate, causing it to not match their ID and get auto-rejected.

In many of these cases, customers are rejected due to user error and not because they were attempting to intentionally defraud the business. This fraud, known as “friendly fraud,” is one of the most common types of fraud that businesses face– and it’s why it’s so important to invest in an ID verification solution that is simple and easy to use.

When to manually review government-issued IDs

Most businesses who use document ID verification software solutions only manually review about 10% of their transactions. These transactions are typically ones that need more scrutiny and are often first flagged by most document ID verification solutions.

Resubmitted IDs

Most customers who accidentally commit “friendly fraud” will successfully resubmit and get approved the second time around, and they don’t need an additional human pair of eyes to verify their government-issued ID. Some businesses, however, like to re-review these resubmitted IDs as an added security measure– particularly when dealing with crypto.

Flagged IDs

Some document ID verification solutions will flag IDs that the system isn’t sure about. The picture may be blurry or the person’s provided selfie might not match the government-issued ID picture exactly. In this case, the business will manually review and make a judgment call.

International IDs

Businesses will sometimes choose to review IDs issued from other countries to ensure the ones they’re accepting are from countries they support. They might also choose to review IDs from specific countries as an added security measure if they’ve received many fraudulent attempts from those places.

How to easily manually review IDs

Whether you hire an individual or a team to manually review IDs, it’s usually as simple as setting up the software to flag the IDs and put them in a “bucket,” so to speak, for your staff to claim and review. 

Berbix uses Action Maps to do this. With Action Maps, businesses can customize the business logic associated with ID verification. This means setting when an ID should be rejected or accepted, and includes all conditions around age and location. For example, an e-scooter business can set it up so that they only accept riders who are 18+ years old in San Francisco and 21+ years old in Philadelphia. Businesses could also stipulate that they’ll only accept driver’s licenses and no passports, if they’d like to curtail international users. 

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Most businesses will need a way to verify that someone is a legitimate user and deter fraudsters. The most successful fraud deterrence strategies are ones that work and scale with you– whether that’s fully automated or a combination of the two.

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