Mitigating Age Verification Scams Within Age-Restricted Product Industries

Businesses that sell age-restricted goods or services have been contending with age verification challenges for several years. Although the necessary controls and preventive measures are in place for a broad category of age-restricted goods, they often need clarification during implementation. However, most companies require more information to face the challenges of fulfilling age verification requirements. Therefore, businesses around the globe suffer from huge penalties or fines due to non-compliance with age-related regulations.

 

On the other hand, simple and easy-to-hack age verification methods like 2-factor authentication are disadvantageous for most businesses. For this reason, experts believe in implementing AI-enabled age verification systems to capture criminals in their tracks.

Recent studies show that e-commerce retailers and gambling businesses seek new solutions to make online sales. Partly, it's true because of the clarity it offers businesses to stay compliant with new and existing regulations. For this reason, the new solutions provide a significant advantage to these businesses in verifying their customers' ages. This way, companies could protect customers from fraudulent attacks and strengthen their brand's reputation. However, the solution also helps with a frictionless customer experience.

Age Verify To Meet Ongoing Verification Requirements

End-to-end age verification is necessary for growing businesses to ensure their products or services are only delivered to customers that are old enough. To avoid age verification scams, online companies can integrate AI-powered solutions. Ultimately, it would ensure confidence among honest customers, which would help with streamlining the customer experience.

Therefore, the age verification system is necessary to determine the legal age of customers and enable confidence among various businesses. Here's how the age verification process works:

Identity Verification

Businesses could meet the KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements through an AI-enabled age verification system. The system helps companies verify their customers' ages and ensure all details are correct. Age verification scams can be controlled quite easily by thoroughly checking the customer's identity, which includes age in the UK and globally.

Checking Age Through Document Verification

Onboard legit customers quite easily and quickly through a simple document verification process. The AI-enabled process would ensure that only age-verified customers are on board, which works more effectively than manual identity document verification.

Meet KYC and AML Requirements

With effective age verification methods, businesses could boost the best customer experience by meeting KYC and AML regulations. Further, companies could also mitigate fraud risks and threats that arise during the customer onboarding process. The AI-enabled solution works efficiently to catch suspicious actors with malicious intent.

Secure Age Verification For Minors Online

Digital age verification is proving to be quite effective for fighting different facets of fraud. Usually, in age verification scams, fraudsters steal the identities of minors to commit various online crimes. Fraudsters tend to attack minors more often, as they don't usually consider interaction with strangers as problematic. Most children indulge in such practices with very little adult supervision. Such malicious activities are most common among online platforms such as gambling and dating sites.

These platforms allow children to prepare their profiles online, which usually becomes a disaster for online businesses. Moreover, these platforms provide them access to age-restricted content that should not be exposed. However, depending on the jurisdiction and use cases, each country has strict laws that would require a higher consideration. In the US, according to the COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act) rule - it's illegal to collect the personal information of youngsters without consent from their parents. In the EU, GDPR also has strict rules and regulations that don't allow the collection of information related to minors.

Businesses have to bear high consequences if they don't comply with age-related regulations. For instance, Musical.ly and FTC paid $5.7 million and $4 million in huge fines for allowing children to open their accounts without using proper safeguards. Usually, using an age checker or asking users to click "I'm 18 years old or not" is insufficient. The users can easily bypass such a simple system.

However, parental consent is mandatory while ensuring careful consideration to secure the children's identity online. However, organizations must implement AI-enabled solutions to prevent age verification scams. Therefore, businesses must secure the online environment by implementing AI-enabled age verification solutions to protect minors online while allowing strict parental control.