Field Notes.
Teardowns of public synthetic-fraud cases and notes on how these losses hide inside ordinary charge-off math. Public-record stories only, clearly sourced. Nothing here is a Delegate engagement or client result.
Why “verified at onboarding” expires
The identity passed the check on day one. The fraud lives in month fourteen. Why point-in-time verification and longitudinal behavior are different questions.
The customer who looks synthetic but isn't
Gig workers, recent immigrants, and cash-heavy households can trip the same signals a synthetic does. Why history, not population averages, and a human, make the call.
The accounts you inherit
Branch and whole-bank acquisitions hand you thousands of accounts you never onboarded. Why an inherited book deserves a retrospective look.
Ring: synthetics rarely work alone
Shared funding sources, shared payees, clustered openings. Why one flagged account should make you look at its neighbors.
Inflection: anatomy of a bust-out week
The regime break against an account's own baseline: utilization to the limit, a cash-equivalent spike. The loudest signal, and the latest.
Ramp: when appetite outruns income
Credit appetite climbing faster than genuine inflows, after removing the money that cycles straight back out.
Coherence: spending with no life in it
Real spending is messy and recurring; staged activity is thin, optimized, round-dollar. What that looks like across 36 months of history.
Provenance: the signal a signup check can't run
Real customers arrive with an economic origin story; synthetics arrive thin and reach for credit fast. First of a five-part series on the signals.
What a fake economic life can't fake
The five behavioral tells that separate a real customer from a cultivated synthetic, in plain English for a bank operator.
Where synthetic losses hide in charge-off math
How loss accounting buries the fraud signal: why charge-off ratios and non-performing-asset numbers can look clean while synthetics ripen.
The $200 million ring that built its own customers
A teardown of the 2013 New Jersey synthetic-fraud prosecution from the public record, walking the cultivation lifecycle through real events.
Field Notes by email
Occasional notes on synthetic identity fraud and how these losses hide. No more than a few a year.
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