The Verification Files

Running identity checks doesn’t guarantee you’re keeping the wrong people out. And collecting more customer data can create risks of its own.

Harald Dols, CEO and co-founder of STRIKE Group, joins Simon Delaney to explore how verification processes fail, why businesses keep information they don’t need, and what happens when stolen or recycled records find their way back into the data used to establish trust.

We discuss the tension between conversion and compliance, why verification at onboarding is only a snapshot, and the emerging challenge of AI agents acting (and spending money) on someone else’s behalf.

We finish with a question the industry needs to answer...does data deserve our trust, or have we simply decided it’s trustworthy because it’s being used for identity verification?

A fraudster gets paid for submitting a fake lead. That same record can later become evidence used to verify someone’s identity.

Affiliate lead generation and KYC might look like unrelated industries, but they’re connected through the commercial data supply chain.

In this episode, I explain how stolen data is submitted through affiliate campaigns, how bots create apparently legitimate collection histories, and how those records can reach commercial databases used for KYC checks.

Then comes the bigger question: what happens when an identity fraudster deliberately uses that route to plant the identities they later want verified?

Two different frauds. One connected data supply chain.

In affiliate marketing, familiarity can pass for legitimacy. The same faces appear at events, build relationships, win awards and pick up campaigns. How much scrutiny happens behind that reputation?

I’m joined by Andy Cooney, co-founder of Marcode, to explore affiliate fraud from two perspectives: fabricated leads and stolen data on my side, ad hijacking and undeserved commissions on his.

We discuss how the fraud works, how operators conceal it, and why subnetworks can become a route onto advertiser programmes, including when the people running them have honest intentions.

We also get into the low barrier to entry, convincing sales pitches, and the gap between knowing which publishers repeatedly cause problems and sharing evidence that others can act on.

The consequences reach beyond wasted budget. When advertisers lose trust and abandon the channel, legitimate affiliates lose business too.

You pay for people who supposedly downloaded your whitepaper. Sales calls them. They’ve never heard of it. Then you’re told to nurture harder.

I believe most B2B content syndication is contact list laundering - database contacts repackaged and sold as genuine engagement.

I explain the delivery process, the blame passed to buyers, and what we found when we tracked submissions on a landing page ourselves.

The names, companies and email addresses can all be real. The interaction you’re paying for can still be invented.

If you disagree, bring evidence. I’ll happily have you on The Verification Files to explain how you make it work.

Commercial KYC databases sit underneath millions of identity checks, but where does the data inside them actually come from?

In this episode, I look at the provenance problem behind commercial KYC: old pre GDPR databases, the huge amount of fresh data needed to keep identity graphs up to date, the breach heavy inflow I’ve seen first-hand, and how the same identity can end up appearing across multiple supposedly independent sources.

My view is simple: a match only tells you two records agree. It doesn’t tell you whether the record you’re matching against should be trusted.

What happens when data looks human enough that we stop questioning whether there’s actually a human behind it?

In this episode, I explore The Human Data Illusion - why names, emails, phone numbers and identities so quickly become 'people' in our heads, and how anthropomorphism, sunk cost, the illusion of progress and loss aversion make bad data hard to reject.AI, synthetic data and stolen identities are making evidence of humanity easier to create than ever, while proving that a real person performed a real action with real intent is getting harder.

After 120 episodes of B2C Lead Generation and nearly three years away, the podcast is back...with a new name and a different focus.

The mechanics of generating leads haven’t disappeared, but the bigger problem has moved underneath them, can we actually trust the data we’re collecting?

In this very short first episode, I explain why B2C Lead Generation has become The Verification Files, and why identity, verification, fraud, KYC, lead generation and data quality are becoming harder problems as AI gets better at creating convincing human looking data.

The question behind the new podcast is simple:

What does the data actually prove?

2023 has been a wild time in marketing, especially lead generation.

In this final episode of the year we dive into some predictions for 2024 with Michael Ferree.

In this episode we look at practical applications of AI within lead gen you could and should be using, right now!

In this podcast we look at why lead buyers may be reluctant to make changes to their process and suggest ways they may be able to get off the hamster wheel to improve results.