Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] Does Data Matching Qualify as Identity Resolution?

“Any true identity resolution engine must not consist simply of a mathematical matching equation, nor must it rely upon data-deterioration processes such as ETL and data warehousing. Math cannot tell a user that Ian is an acceptable nickname for John, nor can simple mathematical equations point to similarities between the colors grey and charcoal.”

Fiscal Policy Institute: Building Up New York, Tearing Down Job Quality

“As buildings go up in New York City, more and more construction work has gone underground, signifying violation of several employment and tax laws. An estimated 50,000 New York City construction workers—nearly one in four—are either misclassified as independent contractors or employed by construction contractors completely off the books.”

SearchDataManagement: Enterprise-wide customer data quality still elusive at most organizations

“So why do so few organizations use data quality tools for customer data enterprise-wide? The reason, according to some, is that most companies collect and store customer data in numerous data sources spread throughout the organization with no way to connect them. Put another way, lacking a single view of the customer through a master data management (MDM) system or customer data integration (CDI) initiative, organizations lack any realistic way of applying data quality tools enterprise-wide.”

WorkersCompensation.com: Rome Man Accused Of Double Dipping

“A 58-year-old Rome man discovered working after he claimed a job-related injury prevented him from doing so was arrested Thursday on charges that he fraudulently collected $17,940 in workers’ compensation benefits.”

Multichannel Merchant: Retail Crime Up Thanks to Down Economy

“According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Returns Fraud Survey, released in November, retailers will see a total of about $219 billion in returns from sales made in 2008 – a 19% increase over the $178 billion in returns recorded in 2007. Of those returns, about $11.8 billion will be fraudulent – an increase of about 8% over last year’s figure of $10.9 billion.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Illinois Business Journal: Closing fraud loopholes would decrease Illinois’ workers’ comp costs

“Workers’ compensation costs for Illinois employers are higher than any of its bordering states, according to Jay Shattuck, executive director of the Illinois Chamber Employment Law Council. Illinois’ average total cost per claim, he says, is $21,335 - compared to Indiana’s $10,517, Wisconsin’s $11,342, Iowa’s $14,292 and Missouri’s $17,309.”

Hub Solution Designs: MDM: Buzz-Worthy But Not A Back-Breaker

“The software vendors who’ve flocked to MDM and put the MDM label on everything under the sun have certainly confused the market. Even so, the MDM software market grew 24% from 2007 to 2008.  In spite of the tough economic times we’re currently in, that rapid growth rate should continue for the next several years.”

Hi-Tech-Blog: Economy down = Employee theft up

“Brian J. Mich, head of anticorruption compliance and investigations at BDO Consulting, says during tough financial times, ‘people have a tendency to give in to temptation to commit criminal behavior,’ and that employers tend to become more vigilant. Mich also observes that people viewed as the most trustworthy–those who have ‘access to systems and information’–often commit the biggest thefts.”

Crain’s New York Business: Shoplifting increases at retail stores

“According to the nationwide study, 84% of retailers, including department stores, specialty apparel companies, electronic stores and drugstores, have seen an increase in theft and amateur shoplifting over the last three months. More than 75% of stores report a rise in financial fraud, and 80% cite intensified organized retail crime.”

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Identity Resolution Daily: If Only Data Quality Were That Simple

“The most effective approach blends several best-of-class techniques, and it scales without compromising performance. A multifaceted solution combines an extensive rules base for nicknames and abbreviations, heuristics, semantics, and a large array of public and proprietary algorithms and other types of analytics.”

MarketWatch: Fraudulent Doctor Surrenders License, Repays $144K to Texas Mutual

“Between January 2003 and March 2006, Shanti and his clinic over-billed workers’ compensation carriers for pain management services in excess of hours actually attended by patients, according to the indictments.”

IT-Director: The problem with data quality solutions part 4

“A typical case might be where one application required a five digit numeric field and another application requires the same five numbers plus an additional two alphabetic characters. So, here’s a question for data quality vendors: can your software tell the difference?”

SecurityInfoWatch: Police, private security given access to ORCIN database

“‘Right now information sharing between loss prevention security and police officers is very limited to who you know,’ said ORCIN Founder Rudy Bravo ‘This way, if you go onto the Web site and post information (about a retail crime) and send it, it will be sent out to all our members.’”

KARE11.com: Retailers report rise in ‘organized’ shoplifting

“What isn’t clear is whether the apparent rise in organized shoplifting is due mostly to the Internet, where auction sites offer sellers an easy way to make money on never-before-used products, or if the shoplifting is rising as the economy gets worse.”

TravelAgentCentral: ASTA Alerts Agents to 2009 Secure Flight Changes

“ASTA said it is essential that travel agents take steps now to prepare for this new set of procedures and offered specific guidelines agents can use to comply with the new data collection rules.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Intelligent Enterprise: Master Data Management Adoption Going Strong

“Business units and IT departments collaborate, cleanse, publish and protect common information assets that are shared across the enterprise. Gartner, however, cautioned that there is no single technology that meets all MDM user requirements, and products vary by technology, industry, data domain and use case, and many span multiple domains.”

Insurance & Financial Advisor: New York man arrested for workers’ compensation fraud

“Queen is accused of accepting $3,000 in workers’ compensation benefits from the New York State Insurance Fund and stating that he was not working as the result of a job-related knee injury. He later collected $7,000 in workers’ compensation benefits from AIG insurance, claiming an injury to the same knee that prevented him from working.”

CIO: The Ugly Truth About “One Version of the Truth”

“‘Many organizations spend months and endure significant costs to obtain the reporting and analysis capabilities that BI promises,’ Hatch writes, ‘only to find that different ‘versions of the truth’ still exist without any definite way of determining which one is real or accurate.’”

Chronicle Herald: Flight rules raise privacy worries

“The name, gender and birth date of Canadians flying from Toronto to destinations such as Cuba, Mexico or even Europe will be transmitted by airlines to the TSA under its Secure Flight program, to take effect next year. The agency will then vet the names against security watch lists aimed at keeping dangerous people on the ground.”

DN/Online: Ask me about my panties

“Retail theft is on the rise and the National Retail Federation said in its 2008 report that 68 percent of retailers have been able to identify or recover stolen merchandise and gift cards on online auction sites, 61 percent more than last year. The report also indicated that 63 percent have seen an increase in e fencing selling stolen items on online auction sites - activity in the last year.”

Seacoastonline.com: Beware organized crime online

“Organized retail crime involves the organized theft of retail merchandise that is resold to consumers through online auction sites and through other outlets, like local flea markets. These organized crime rings target over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, baby formula, tobacco cessation products, pregnancy strips, diabetic test strips, cosmetics and similar types of personal care items.”

bobsguide: Recession gives rise to online fraud fears

“Business Journal said the study by fraud detection specialist 41st Parameter and the Merchant Risk Council found that 84 per cent of respondents are concerned that internet retailers will face a ’slight or substantial’ increase in fraudulent activity.”

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By the Infoglide Team

NOTE: We will start posting again after Thanksgiving. Happy Turkey Day!

datanomic: Are we nearly there yet?

“In the 1990s, Customer Relationship Management promised, amongst other things, to provide us with a single view of customers, but the ideal fragmented into a number of different disciplines, largely dictated by technology vendors.  Instead of a single customer view, most organisations have multiple, often inconsistent views of their customers and prospects delivered through an assortment of Sales Force Automation, Analytical CRM and Campaign Management systems each propagating their own database.”

Scamtypes: 5 Types Of Social Networking Scam - #1 The Fake Identity

“Setting up a new profile on the major social networking sites is an incredibly simple thing to do. For criminals this presents a tremendous opportunity as it allows them to affiliate themselves with just about any identity, whether that is a real person or not. For some, a fake identity may just be a means of having fun online, however warped that intention may be. For others, far more sinister motives guide them, from arranging risky meetings to making abusable connections and many other shady reasons.”

Conde Nast Daily Traveler: Bush Officials Claim a Kinder, Gentler Airport Security

“And sometime in January, you will start giving your birth date, home address, and full legal name when you make an airline reservation–all part of a ’secure flight’ initiative that will reduce the number of innocent people who are falsely flagged as potential terrorists because their names resemble those of actual bad guys.”

The Bunker Blog: Macy’s Loss Prevention Agent Arrested For Assisting Shoplifters

“One of the alleged shoplifters was the sister of the loss prevention agent. The 24 year old LP agent had been working for Macy’s since February, and his manager suspected something was going on, so a surveillance was conducted on the LP agent by the manager.”

Evolution of Security: Why?

“More than 23 million passengers were screened at our checkpoints last year during the holiday season, and many of those passengers travel infrequently. Those are the travelers we’d most like to reach. Passenger feedback has shown us that people are more willing to comply with security procedures if they understand the ‘why’ behind the measure.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Windsor Star: OLG coughs up cash

“The insider policy is to guard against fraud, such as a retailer who tells a customer a ticket is not a winner and then tries to claim the prize. In the spring of 2007, a provincial ombudsman issued a scathing report on the OLG and said Ontario store owners and their families had collected tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims.”

MarketWatch: Worldwide thefts cost retailers US $104 billion annually - Survey

“This year’s survey, the most complete analysis of global shrink ever conducted, reports key findings on retail shrinkage and crime in 36 countries and on five continents, based on data from a confidential survey of 920 large retailers with combined sales of U.S. $814 billion and 115,612 operating retail outlets…’This sum represents a tax imposed on honest people by retail criminals of $229.73 per household or $71.12 for every single person in the 36 countries surveyed,’ said Professor Bamfield, Director of the Centre for Retail Research.”

Jackson Citizen Patriot: Kids learn online dangers

“Internet predators lurk on networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, or in chat rooms, looking for young victims. ‘Everybody you meet online is an Internet stranger,’ Malik Williams, an Internet-safety presenter from the Michigan Cyber Safety Initiative, told more than 50 fifth-graders Tuesday at Concord Elementary School. ‘That’s why it’s important to keep yourself safe.’”

Bucyrus TelegraphForum: Bucyrus experiences rash of break-ins

“‘There is a new trend in what we call e-fencing. Thieves are selling their stolen items on the Internet versus just selling them outright. They can get up to 70 percent or more of the value if they sell on the Internet versus selling them on the streets, where they only get about 30 percent of the value,’ Teets said.”

SFGate: Ex-S.F. firefighter’s workers’ comp problem

“Indeed, if Hijjawi were trying to hide her fitness quest, she wasn’t doing a very good job. Our own Google search turned up records showing her running in marathons in Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles, Honolulu and elsewhere. From 2001 to 2006, according to records on the Web site Athlinks, Hijjawi ran in no fewer than a dozen marathons. And her biography on another site shows she was taking on even bigger challenges, including the Canada 2005 Ultraman super triathlon competition - in which competitors swim 6.2 miles, ride a bike for 170 miles and run 52 miles, twice the distance of a marathon. Completing it took her more than 33 hours.”

Bunker Blog: Update On Cops Involved In Major Shoplifting Ring

“Kevin Burchell and Clifford Barber, both police officers, worked with two others, one of them an employee at the Walmart the items were taken from; to get up to $200,000.00 worth of merchandise out of the store and onto an eBay site. According to the latest report, Barber was the mastermind behind the scheme, and sold the items on eBay and to friends and acquaintances.”

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With each new revelation of lottery fraud, the urgency of preventing further occurrences intensifies. It’s now a top line issue for lottery commissions because it threatens to significantly decrease revenue. The danger is that the number of consumers feeling at risk about being paid on a winning ticket could reach a tipping point. An affected lottery could see a substantial decrease in revenue almost overnight, and it’s difficult to predict when that tipping point will be reached.

Detecting and preventing lottery fraud requires a specialized combination of experience and technology. In particular, when lottery fraud is committed by retailers, the people defrauding the system are aware of just how the system works, so the solution has to be able to outsmart people who know all the tricks.

The same can be said for Organized Retail Crime fraud.  These types of crimes cost the retail industry over $40 billion a year. In helping retail customers attack these problems, our identity resolution software churns through enterprise identity data (e.g., employees, merchandise returns, customers, shoplifters, bad check data) to resolve identities and detect hidden relationships.

As with retail, the data to detect lottery fraud is readily available, but solving the crime requires knowledge about handling multiple, disparate data sources and how to find hidden connections using identity resolution. In fact, the parameters of lottery fraud are strikingly similar to retail fraud. Someone who understands how the system works fraudulently fences merchandise (or a winning lottery ticket).  Retailers can check potential fraudsters against a list of employees and known shoplifters, while government-run lotteries can check winners against lists of lottery retailers and – for example - delinquent taxpayers.

Forward-thinking lotteries are quickly moving to exploit solutions based on identity resolution to solve the problem. The risk of declining revenues is just too high to do nothing.

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By the Infoglide Team

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.                                                  – W. Clement Stone

We recently shared a link to an article describing how trucking companies in California illegally mislabeled their drivers as “independent contractors” in order to keep from paying workers’ compensation insurance. The law clearly defines the drivers as “employees” since the companies own the trucks and define everything the drivers do.

Because identity resolution software is often used to detect fraudulent behavior, we continually hear of instances like this one where people try to cut corners or take unfair advantage or flat out cheat other people and companies in ways that often involve obscuring identity information. People try to game software systems and cheat in areas like workers’ compensation, online commerce, lotteries, retail, airlines, insurance, social networking, and others. (You can read more on our web site and in previous blog posts here.)

Almost all of us know the right way and the wrong way to do things. Sadly, we sometimes choose to ignore that inner voice when it benefits us, even though it may harm someone else. OK, so we can’t fix the world with a blog post, but it’s hard not to speculate what the world might be like if we all tried to do the right thing all the time.

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[Post from Infoglide] MDM Needs An Engine, Not Spark Plugs

“Blog posts and marketing collateral often confuse identity resolution with data matching. When discussing master data management (MDM) solutions, you sometimes hear the term “identity resolution” applied when simple similarity matching is all that’s being used. That’s like calling a set of spark plugs an engine.”

Canada Media Centre: International Data Protection Authorities Call for Action to Protect Children’s Online Privacy

“Young people today are sophisticated users of the Internet, and they use this medium with ease and enthusiasm,” says Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner. While the opportunities are tremendous, we must ensure that they understand the impact that these technologies can have on their privacy, and provide them with the tools and information they need to make smart decisions.”

B-Eye-Network: Voter Registration and Data Quality (Or Lack Thereof…)

“As a data quality practitioner always seeking ways to communicate the value of data integrity, it is always a pleasure when you wake up in the morning and the Washington Post hands you a juicy data quality-related story.”

The Bunker Blog: Inside LP - Social Network For LP Professionals

“Inside LP is a relatively new social network especially for Loss Prevention Professionals. The site offers networking opportunities, discussion forums, and a community blog.”

B-Eye-Network: Elusive Data Quality

“Even though certain values are known to be incorrect, they nevertheless are what were written when the application was made. And then there is the more widely held case where names are misspelled or street addresses are misspelled. There is a good argument to be made that says that even incorrect entries here should not be corrected.”

Hub Solution Designs: Evan Levy’s Workshop at MDM Summit

“Evan’s session was interesting, with a wealth of examples from his years of real-world MDM experience. I heard some great quotes today.”

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By the Infoglide Team

PR-USA.NET: Gartner Reveals Nine Fatal Flaws in Business Intelligence Implementations

“Data quality issues are almost ubiquitous and the impact on BI is significant — people won’t use BI applications that are founded on irrelevant, incomplete or questionable data. To avoid this, firms should establish a process or set of automated controls to identify data quality issues in incoming data and block low-quality data from entering the data warehouse or BI platform.”

Edmonton Journal: ‘Misplaced generosity’ led to fraud

“A former Workers’ Compensation Board case manager who received tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks is a deeply troubled woman whose “misplaced generosity” led her to overpay claimants more than $1 million, according to a defence report submitted at her sentencing hearing.”

Secrecy News: Intelligence Policy Would Reward Information Sharing

“‘We have taken a critical step toward ensuring that information sharing becomes ingrained in the way the federal government operates,’ said Amb. Thomas McNamara, the ODNI Information Security Environment program manager, in an October 6 news release.”

Retail Technology Blog: Retail theft skyrockets

“The 20th annual retail theft survey found 24 retailers, with more than 19,000 stores, apprehended a record 708,962 shoplifters and dishonest employees in 2007 and recovered more than $150 million in stolen property.”

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