Why we built the Truepic Risk Network

Authored by Phillip Denis, Truepic’s Chief Revenue Officer

We are driven by a deep commitment to building secure and authentic ways for businesses and organizations to operate with confidence. We believe that authenticity is the foundation of every meaningful interaction in the digital world. That’s why some of the world’s largest and most influential financial institutions and service companies rely on Truepic Vision to securely and efficiently digitalize their processes. Truepic’s technology has become a trusted cornerstone in enterprise workflows worldwide.

Last week, Truepic announced the launch of its latest initiative, the Risk Network, the world’s first shared intelligence system for visual and device-level risk signals. This network is the product of years of experience in providing image and data authenticity technology. By testing device, behavioral, and image integrity, Truepic is uniquely able to transform those results into an anonymous, shared intelligence layer that strengthens protection across financial services. The need for such an infrastructure was not always obvious, but evolving and sophisticated fraud patterns helped highlight the necessity for device-level intelligence to mitigate visual risk. 

Similar tactics, multiple victims 

It has been shown that fraud is significantly increasing, with the majority driven by sophisticated rings, often operating internationally and leveraging AI. The Risk Network is built on a simple thesis: sophisticated fraud actors don’t stop at one institution; they quickly replicate the same tactics across many and in almost rapid succession. Recent studies have shown that fraud rings often target commercial and governmental services using the same personas and tactics. According to Socure, it is estimated that between 2% and 12% of all government loan applications come from international fraud rings. 

We saw this too. 

While using Truepic’s Vision platform, a financial services company specializing in business verification flagged suspicious images that were submitted as proof of a business located in a major midwestern U.S. city. The claimed business owner submitted the digital media, but the client noticed inconsistencies, most notably that the building in the images did not resemble infrastructure typical of that city. This warranted the client requesting that Truepic take a deeper look at the images and related data. Upon additional scrutiny, we identified other anomalies, such as pictures of screens, all building angles originating from the same vantage point and several images appearing to be photos of other photos. These strange patterns warranted a deeper investigation. 

The Truepic investigation determined that the images and device originated from a sophisticated actor, involved in a fraud ring, employing advanced fraud techniques to spoof locations. The fraudulent images were actually coming from Eastern Europe, not the United States. This sophisticated group of fraudsters went to great lengths to cover tracks, such as printing out fake signage to hang on the exterior of their buildings and using advanced spoofing techniques to try and hide their location. 

The review also uncovered that commonalities such as the device profile and location had submitted similar fabricated images to eight other clients in the same industry within the same period of time. Such cases illustrate that fraudsters rarely target a single institution; instead, they exploit their investments in fake personas, businesses, and techniques to attack as many enterprises as possible within a sector, usually in a compressed time period. 

This type of sophisticated fraud does not stop at business verification. We identified similar-style fraud patterns in other industries, such as home lending. For example, we saw fraudulent actors recycle and reuse devices and tactics to take out multiple loans from different lenders based on the same property. In one egregious case, a fraudster took multiple loans totaling over $13 million on a property valued at less than $1 million. All loan applications were almost simultaneous.

For every institution receiving images or an application, they recognized a new application without realizing that the user and the device used to capture these images were linked to past fraudulent transactions. 

Stopping this from happening again 

These cases helped crystallize a key insight: for financial services, effective information sharing is essential to mitigating visual risk in the AI era. With the Truepic Risk Network now in place, these devices will be flagged across every financial institution targeted with the same technique. These alerts will remain fully anonymized, but the shared intelligence will provide immense value, empowering institutions to preempt fraud, strengthen their defenses, and collectively reduce visual risk across the industry.

The Risk Network transforms isolated defenses into a collective shield. With every new institution that joins, the system becomes more powerful, protecting not only individual enterprises but also the integrity of financial services as a whole.