The Scoop: FaceTec started in 2013 as a what-if project and has become a global cybersecurity leader in biometric face authentication software. The tech company has pioneered commercially viable Liveness detection and facial verification systems that have many virtual-world applications. The software can upgrade security for financial institutions, government agencies, social networks, and any organization with a user database. Dating industry professionals have recently partnered with FaceTec to add more robust security measures to online dating and declare war on bots, hackers, and scammers worldwide.
Over the last few years, a silent crisis has escalated and taken hold of the online dating scene. No, I don’t mean ghosting. Online dating scams have been raking in bigger and bigger bucks from unsuspecting singles around the world.
In 2020, Americans reported higher losses to romance scams than to any other type of fraud. The reported losses reached a record $304 million. To put that in perspective, it was $75 million in 2016. The number of romance scam victims has tripled from about 10,000 in 2016 to over 30,000 in 2020.
Online romance scams pose a significant problem that undermines trust in the online dating industry. If a dating profile could potentially ruin a single person’s finances, that’s a problem the industry has to address, and some tech leaders are working to do just that.
The Meet Group has teamed up with FaceTec to upgrade the newly released Mimi app and bring greater security to online daters. FaceTec provided cutting-edge, face biometric security software to ensure all the dating app’s users are real people.
“We can add a layer of security that social media and online dating hasn’t had before,” said Kevin Alan Tussy, CEO at FaceTec. “Our Liveness Detections technology has been working exceptionally well for more than 150 million of our users from all over the world.”
FaceTec helps organizations ensure that each user can only have only one account.
FaceTec provides a number of security assurances that fit nicely into the online dating experience. Its software can check that a user is a living person and block an individual from creating multiple fake accounts.
Since its founding in 2013, FaceTec has developed and strengthened tech solutions that authenticate users and eliminate fakes from any database. The company has offices in the U.S. in San Diego and Summerlin, Nevada, with staff in Singapore, Portugal, and Brazil. Its team has decades of experience in the tech industry and has pursued the security field out of a desire to help online communities, online businesses, and online life thrive.
“When we started FaceTec, we knew things were going to change and security was going to be a bigger and bigger issue. You didn’t need a crystal ball to see that,” Kevin said. “So we made a commitment to build a company around the idea that tech can actually verify that the person who has access to this account is indeed both alive and the correct, legitimate account holder.”
Certified Liveness & 3D Face Matching Verification
FaceTec is an upstanding company on a mission to bring more transparency and trust to the online world. Its team works behind the scenes to protect information integrity, verify online user identities, and stop online frauds and scams of all types.
“Our end users are from every part of the world and on every kind of device you can imagine,” Kevin explained. “We work with customers who have their own large user bases. Then we focus on protecting those users because if the users are protected, the organizations are protected as well.”
Through these cross-industry integrator partnerships, FaceTec protects more than 20 million-and-growing user access sessions every month.
FaceTec’s security solutions do not involve surveillance or information mining. Instead, the team has focused on using biometric face matching to verify the individual user’s identity. The process is usually as simple as a two-second video taken upon login.
“In our system, there are security layers,” Kevin said. “For example, we encrypt the biometric data with a proprietary algorithm, and then we also irreversibly timestamp the liveness data, so even if they got hold of it somehow, hackers couldn’t do anything with the information because the liveness data has expired. A new Liveness check must be performed during every future login session because once access is granted, that liveness data won’t work for any other login.”
FaceTec’s certified liveness system boasts 99.9998% accuracy in the real world, not a lab, at assessing whether the user is human, and the face matching system can compare the user’s face against up to nearly 13 million faces. It has proven a useful tool for financial institutions, blockchain groups, cryptocurrency wallets, digital ID programs, social networks, and other tech-driven organizations.
FaceTec has sophisticated tools that can up the caliber of any membership base.
Kevin told us the case studies published on FaceTec’s website are just a fraction of the work that goes on behind the scenes. Hundreds of security-conscious companies have worked with FaceTec and benefited from its solutions — but they’re not too public about it.
“Our customers range from dating apps to DHS,” Kevin said. “While the user experience is always the same intuitive two-second video selfie, the security is very high, and we are even working on some national ID programs that are rolling out soon.”
Whether it’s working alongside a dating company or a sovereign government agency, FaceTec endeavors to provide smart security solutions and streamlined verification systems to make everything run smoothly.
A $100,000 Spoof Bounty Available to Anyone Who Hacks It
FaceTec is a fast-moving and transparent company run by tech experts with big dreams and firm ethical values. Its company mission is dedicated to the social good of policing and protecting online databases.
“We have a small, very focused team of just over 30. Everyone on our team has a unique skill set, and they are more dedicated than any group of people I’ve ever worked with,” Kevin said. “It’s very important to have such a cohesive team when you are taking on the world’s best hackers and most devious fraudsters.”
Users can be confident in FaceTec’s ability to guard their information, because the tech is constantly being tested in the $100k Spoof Bounty Program.
To make sure it stays ahead of the hackers, the FaceTec team has opened its applications to the masses and challenged anyone with the chops to try to hack it. This is a simple and effective way of crowdsourcing the toughest real-world conditions. White-hat and black-hat hackers can test the system in hopes of a payday. Any hacker that successfully finds a security flaw will be given a bounty of up to $100,000, and it has only happened twice in the last 14 months. But when a new threat is found, the FaceTec team will go to work on a patch and usually fix the issue within a couple of days.
Through its bounty program, FaceTec has withstood over 45,000 attacks so far. Each attack is a learning opportunity and gives the team more confidence in its cybersecurity.
FaceTec said it aims to set high industry standards for securing online data across the board and ensure the biometric verification industry grows in a responsible and user-driven direction.
“Our teams’ individual skills are complimentary, and we are all very focused around securing account access,” Kevin said. “Everybody has a real clear-headed view of where this industry is headed and why it’s so important.”
FaceTec Protects Over 15M New Accounts Every Month
FaceTec has the potential to solve the security crisis in the online dating industry. Its advanced verification technology can shore up the industry’s personal user data access weaknesses and give online daters greater peace of mind when they’re browsing, swiping, and chatting.
Tightening security on a dating site or app is in everyone’s best interest (well, not the romance scammers). It’s good for users because it ups the quality of their matches. It’s good for the company because it significantly lowers the risk of hackers and scam profiles taking over the database. And it’s good for the industry’s overall reputation and credibility.
By working with FaceTec, dating professionals can make the online dating future brighter and safer — and make online romance scams a thing of the past.
“When we look at the dating industry, our main question is: Why aren’t you checking user Liveness, why aren’t you checking users for duplicate accounts?,” Kevin asked. “Usually, the answer we hear is that they didn’t know the technology existed, so we created the website www.Liveness.com to help educate the industry, the media, and the end users about how Liveness Detection protects privacy and will power the cybersecurity for the next generation of remote access systems.”
