In Australia's ever-increasing world of virtual commerce the prevalence of identity fraud is showing no signs of abating and as low cost technology becomes more abundant, the proliferation of false identity documents is gathering pace.
Responding to calls for greater measures to detect scams and to step up fraud prevention, the Australian Bankers' Association (ABA) has proposed a national electronic gateway as Australia's best weapon against fraud.
-The false identity problem is of significant concern for all of us because criminals 'become you', to steal from you," ABA director Ian Woods said at the Identity Fraud conference in Sydney.
-Ten years ago a criminal would require access to sophisticated printing skills and machinery, but now inexpensive desktop publishing and limited expertise can produce high quality fake documents," he added.
"A national electronic gateway is one solution because it allows validation of identity documents."
The gateway would work by directly validating document data - such as a driver's licence or birth certificate - with the appropriate government agency when presented by the customer, allowing for realtime protection against identification fraudsters.
As well as being able to validate documentation data, the ABA is calling for consistency of documents used to authenticate a person's identity across all states and territories.
The banking association also wants to see strict standards set for the production and issuance of identity documents as well as the enhancement of security features in those documents, incorporating holograms for example.
According to figures from the Australian Institute of Criminology fraud of this kind is costing the Australian community about AU$3.5 billion dollars a year.
"There is an urgent need to develop models of online identification, so all parties know with whom they are dealing, in the interest of efficiency and fraud prevention," Woods said.
"We're addressing what we perceive to be a growing problem and we believe this to be a positive first step."
A national gateway of this kind would extend what 18 months ago commenced as a pilot scheme between Westpac and NSW registry of births, deaths and marriages. The pilot scheme saw the two institutions working together to validate customers' birth certificates.
