Identity scores are increasingly being adopted as a means to prevent fraud in business[1] and as a tool to verify and correct public records.
Identity scores incorporate, a broad set of consumer data that gauges a person's legitimacy.
Identity scoring was originally developed for use by financial services firms to measure the fraud risk for new customers opening accounts.
Typical external credit and fraud checks often fail to detect erroneous background information.
Every time an individual changes a job, buys or sells property, or has an encounter with law enforcement, this person's public records are altered.
Identity scoring works by matching the information the user provides against billions of records in public databases, ranging from property and tax records to Internet search engines, and calculating it against patterns designed to recognize fraud or identity theft.
However, Gartner research analyst Avivah Litan warned that identity scoring was not a foolproof system, as it still relied on the underlying accuracy of the information used.