Frauds, Phones & Fingerprints
Proving Your Identity in the Digital Age
Pulling an esoteric topic toward public awareness, Frauds, Phones & Fingerprints is an accessible guide to identity theft and contemporary methods of combating it.
An engaging insider’s analysis, Almis Ledas’s Frauds, Phones & Fingerprints covers the history of identity theft and the lengths governments and corporations go to to protect against fraud.
The history of identity theft and law enforcement’s efforts at curtailing fraud are covered in clear, lucid prose, moving from ration cards, birth certificates, and passports toward driver’s licenses, credit cards, and cell phones, with the book progressing toward sophisticated means of identifying individuals, as with biometric data. Early versions of identification were easier for fraudulent parties to exploit, the book notes. At the same time, the book explores the barriers to individual use represented by two-factor identification and smart chips:
Using analytics and probabilities to evaluate transactions resulted in a mathematical war of attrition in which the card associations and financial institutions had to trade off two types of errors.
The efforts of governments, corporations, banks, and merchants to verify individuals’ identities and the increasing lengths that scammers must go to to beat complex security systems are also covered. The tension between unlawful parties and agencies attempting to protect against identity theft is also present throughout.
Showing that the ramifications of identity protection methods extend far beyond the world of security, the book distills complex topics down well. It includes concrete examples of companies—including security specialists ZenKey and telecommunications companies Apple, Samsung, and Google—taking unique approaches to cybersecurity; it also addresses the commonalities between such corporations’ methodologies. Privacy concerns born of mass data collection, the dangers and benefits of social media, and the vulnerabilities that are exploited by hackers are also covered, rounding out the book’s analyses.
With its bevy of historical and technology-field examples, this resource explores a variety of contemporary methods of protecting people’s identities with clarity. In illuminating the ongoing struggles against identity fraud and cybercrime, it pulls an esoteric topic toward public awareness. Its explorations of various agency methods of protecting identity result in welcome transparency on a topic that’s often obscured by long lists of terms and conditions. Though it’s best suited to an audience of information technology specialists, the book places the language of the cybersecurity sector in sufficient context to assure lay accessibility.
Frauds, Phones & Fingerprints is an eloquent technology book that covers salient issues in the field of identity verification.
Reviewed by
Caitlin Cacciatore
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
