How to prevent fraud during coronavirus outbreak

17 Mar 2020

Coronavirus spread has been bringing a lot of fear, uncertainty and even panic to people and organizations around the globe. Simultaneously, it has been paving paths for online fraud. What are the types of scam to watch out for? How can online identity verification help businesses and organizations to detect and prevent fraud? Let’s take a look.

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a huge and devastating impact on almost every sector of the economy worldwide. While China seems to have been able to cope with and restrain the virus spread within its borders, Europe is currently facing dramatically rising numbers of people infected.

The situation is progressing rapidly and unpredictably, so governments and healthcare authorities are unable to make accurate and adequate assumptions on the virus spread.

Declaring national emergency and establishing quarantine seems to be the most reasonable decision on the government level to hold back the spread of blazingly pervasive virus.

Estonian government has closed down schools, public places such as cinemas and museums and declared all public events to be postponed. The majority of companies and services have been forced to either shut down their activity or switch to working remotely. Luckily, our technological era allows businesses to carry on with the daily tasks and operations effectively from the temporary home offices. However, it also creates some problems and challenges for society.

Most importantly, services become physically unavailable or restricted for the consumers, including even essential institutions such as hospitals and pharmacies.

Moreover, coronavirus has created a slew of opportunities for scammers to perform all sorts of online fraud. Worldwide news continues to report online scam growth during the virus outbreak from false or misleading information, fake virus maps to phishing and scamming people to buy face masks. Face masks themselves present a perfect opportunity to fraudsters – crossing borders, stealing, buying illegal products. Fraudsters will use every opportunity to capitalize on. Therefore, people must be paying more attention to whom they are dealing with and trust only the proven sources.

Considering all of the above, there is no doubt that online identity verification and face recognition will help businesses and consumers to cope with and minimize the level of fraud by utilizing identity verification. Modern and complex solutions can help businesses and healthcare organizations with customer identification, verification and authentication – delivering fast, secure and precise results.

GetiD CEO and co-founder Dmitri Laush shares his concerns on the matter: “Despite the Coronavirus pandemic, everyday life is still going on and people need to have secure access to financial, insurance and healthcare services. Today’s technology enables companies to carry on with day-to-day business even during turbulent and uncertain days like these. As we all have to rely more on the online space, trusted digital identities have to be created in order to keep customers’ data safe and secure. Online Identity Verification can definitely build more order, trust and protection for online services and customers during this challenging time.”