Real estate
Case study: Letref
How Letref protects the high-net-worth clients and properties they serve with automated fraud detection.
Headline result
16%
of unique documents flagged as high-risk.
We have found Fraud Finder to be a useful tool, especially as fraudsters are getting better and better at producing fake documents. There are many cases where we’ve sensed something is ‘off’ but cannot quite put our fingers on it and having the ability to run the docs through Fraud Finder has been a great back up to confirm our intuition was correct. It also gives us evidence of the fraudulent activity, as there are times when we are challenged by the applicant.
Kathy Hawes, Director
Meet Letref...
A case study on how Letref use Fraudfinder as an additional layer of protection for their clients in a high-risk fraud environment.
The client
Meet Letref, a specialist lettings reference company that prides themselves on working in a totally different way to its referencing competitors.
Many letting agents and landlords go for the cheapest referencing service thinking it will save them money. It’s a false economy and can end up costing £1,000s when it all goes horribly wrong - causing financial damage, not to mention reputational damage. LetRef are different in that they offer an exceptionally thorough referencing service and provide a far more individual and investigative service.
The challenge
LetRef agents already had a talent for thorough investigation into every aspect of a tenancy application after many years of spotting irregularities for their trusted and longstanding clients.
However, Kathy, Lone and their team were still manually checking these documents and lacked the ability to rely on tangible, scientific evidence when flagging issues with an application. LetRef deals with several high-net-worth individuals, high-end properties and clients so they set out to add a further, automated due diligence tool that could provide an anatomic analysis of the financial documents supplied during their tenancy applications to evidence and back up their suspicions. Enter Fraudfinder.
The solution
The LetRef team use Fraudfinder when they have a suspicion about some of the documents supplied to them to analyse. Kathy claimed that since implementing our automated analysis tool,
“rather than scouring through docs, often taking two people an hour or so, we can run them through Fraud Finder and if it comes back as high risk, it confirms our suspicions were correct. We rely on our judgement in conjunction, but it certainly has cut down the time spent, often from an hour or so to a few mins.”
This means that the LetRef team spend 91% less time manually reviewing each document whilst also using the results as a robust evidence trail to explicitly detail the fraudulent ‘what’ and ‘where’ questions, giving the team a “peace of mind” that they are protecting their customers with the best resources available to them.
The results
A whopping 22% of the time the documents processed by LetRef came back as either ‘high risk’ or in need of further consideration.
The technology implemented has helped prevent fraudulent applicants from securing and possibly sublet expensive properties around the UK - protecting the assets of their letting agency partners and landlords.
In line with the list of most popular banks in the UK, Fraudfinder helped prevent document fraud on Lloyds bank statements amongst a number of different institutions.
18% of their high risk documents failed our font analysis test which determines whether the bank statement contains the correct number and style of fonts associated with different banking institutions. 55% of the returned high-risk documents failed our document properties test, in which we examine the meta data and structure of each document instantly. These documents can fail because of an interaction with a blacklisted software, a detected sequence of editing evidenced through the saving timestamps or even the appearance of irregular layers within the documents. It is this level of scientific analysis, with the proof that comes with it, that has improved the operational processes behind the LetRef application review process.
Fraud and risk in Real Estate
- Industry: Real Estate
- Use cases: Confirming suspicious applications as fraudulent during tenant qualification
- Headquarters: London, UK
- Employees: 1-25
Features applicable:
Advanced document analysis
Affordability checks
In their words
We have found Fraud Finder to be a useful tool, especially as fraudsters are getting better and better at producing fake documents. There are many cases where we’ve sensed something is ‘off’ but cannot quite put our fingers on it and having the ability to run the docs through Fraud Finder has been a great back up to confirm our intuition was correct. It also gives us evidence of the fraudulent activity, as there are times when we are challenged by the applicant.
Kathy Hawes, Director
