Real businesses. Real numbers.

At 12% fraud rate across 8,000 monthly applications, approximately 960 fraudulent submissions were reaching the credit bureau check each month. Each one triggered a credit search (£1.20), a fraud bureau check (£0.80), and partial underwriting resource (£6–£8 per case reviewed). Total downstream cost on fraudulent submissions: approximately £8,600/month.

SIM swap fraud was the dominant vector — criminals swapping a victim's SIM, intercepting OTPs, and completing applications before the account owner was aware. Synthetic identity applications (S1–S4 reason codes) made up the remaining 30%.

TDS Risk Trust Score was added as a pre-screen at the point of application submission — before the application reached the credit check queue. Applications with a trustScore below 600 or a riskLevel of 1–2 (SIM swapped within 72 hours) were automatically flagged for review or rejected. Applications with DV, S1–S4, or RL reason codes triggered escalated review.

At 50,000 leads per month with a 19% invalid rate, approximately 9,500 bad leads were entering the distribution pipeline monthly. Client chargeback costs, platform credibility issues, and wasted sales team time on the client side was generating significant commercial pressure on the platform.

The dominant issue was lineType — VOIP and non-mobile numbers that look like valid mobile numbers but can never be contacted on a standard dialler. Secondary issues were deactivated lines (D2) and web-scraped numbers (D1).

TDS Risk Trust Score was added to the lead capture API before leads were written to the distribution database. Any submission returning lineType of fixedvoip, nonfixedvoip, or landline was rejected at the form. Submissions with D1, D2, or PN codes were also blocked. Remaining leads were enriched with the trustScore value for client-side filtering.

Full KYC checks cost £2.80–£3.80 per application at the volumes they were running. With a 9% fraud rate across 15,000 monthly applications, approximately 1,350 fraudulent applications were consuming KYC budget monthly — around £4,200/month on applications that should have been blocked earlier.

Synthetic identity (S1–S4 codes) and account takeover via SIM swap (riskLevel 1) were the primary fraud vectors. Both were slipping through initial checks and only being caught at the KYC or post-onboarding stage.

TDS Risk Trust Score and Mobile KYC were both deployed — Trust Score as a broad upstream gate, Mobile KYC as a targeted pre-KYC screen for applications that passed Trust Score but showed moderate risk signals. Applications with riskLevel 1 or synthetic identity codes were blocked before KYC was triggered. Applications with moderate signals received Mobile KYC in place of the more expensive full document KYC.