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.
Read →The member 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.
Read →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.
Read →Ring: synthetics rarely work alone
Shared funding sources, shared payees, clustered openings. Why one flagged account should make you look at its neighbors.
Read →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.
Read →Ramp: when appetite outruns income
Credit appetite climbing faster than genuine inflows, after removing the money that cycles straight back out.
Read →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.
Read →Provenance: the signal a signup check can't run
Real members arrive with an economic origin story; synthetics arrive thin and reach for credit fast. First of a five-part series on the signals.
Read →What a fake economic life can't fake
The five behavioral tells that separate a real member from a cultivated synthetic, in plain English for a bank operator.
Read →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.
Read →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.
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