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While many people are familiar with online protections like firewalls
and anti-virus software, savvy consumers are choosing to give
their e-business to companies that also use real-time data verification
to block identity theft and fraud.
"Real-time data verification and authentication protects
both the consumer and the business," says John Andrews, director
of technical services for DataX Corp, a Las Vegas-based data services
company. "The technology compares an online consumer's information
to literally millions of public and private records to instantly
verify the individual's identity."
For both the consumer and the company, the process appears simple
and seamless. A customer arrives at a company's Web site, to purchase
a product or, more commonly, a financial service, and is prompted
to provide basic information, such as name, address, telephone
number and e-mail address.
The first layer of defense, data verification, compares that
information to public records to confirm that the data is accurate
- that a phone number entered is a real number or the mailing
address actually exists. Verifying this initial data before it
becomes integrated into the company's records can save a business
the cost of cleaning out "garbage data" later on, Andrews
notes.
Next, the process verifies that the personal information entered,
such as a driver's license or social security number, represents
a real person. "For example, DataX Corp's system will check
a social security number against the Social Security Administration's
list of active numbers to confirm that the number entered doesn't
belong to someone who is deceased," Andrews says.
Finally, the information is authenticated by prompting the user
to enter additional information that is verified through comparison
to millions of additional records, such as credit bureau information
and other public records. This last step helps ensure that the
individual providing the information is really who he or she claims
to be.
From online retailers to financial institutions, companies that
once struggled to perform their own data verification by connecting
to individual data sources are now turning to services like DataX
Corp to manage real-time data verification for them. "This
route allows a company to access the most current sources of information
for verifying identity, without the costs and difficulties of
managing relationships with all these data resources on their
own," says Derek LaFavor, CEO of DataX. "It's good business
sense on two very fundamental levels: protecting your customers
from identity theft, and protecting the company from costly fraudulent,
and just wrong, information."
The end result is a fast, cost-effective means of confirming
identifying information. To learn more about how real-time data
verification protects consumers and helps businesses, visit www.dataxcorp.com.
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