Identity and trust: KYB, KYC and ongoing monitoring

Common mistakes

1 min read · Chapter 9 of 10

What usually goes wrong

Symptom	Likely cause	First thing to check
Business stuck in review for days	Trade name vs legal name, EIN belongs to a parent, new LLC not yet indexed, foreign parent	The match result per field, then which document would settle it
Approved company turns out to be a hijacked real business	Recent officer, agent or address change, or a reinstatement, that a data match accepted	The registry's change history and the officer list before the change
Fraud from brand-new LLCs	Companies formed with stolen identities	The person's check, address type, company age, formation agent patterns
Terminated merchant back under a new company	Fresh LLC with a relative as owner	Matching on people, phone, address, device and bank account, not just the entity
High-risk merchant boarded as low-risk	Industry code assigned from the application, not the website	Website review at onboarding and again later
Good applicants fail the person check	Thin file, name changes, newcomers, poor cameras	Which check failed, and whether a document step-up was offered
Synthetic identity passes, then busts out months later	Details built to match bureau data	eCBSV, synthetic-identity scores, how fast details get reused across applications
Selfie check passed by a deepfake	Injected camera feed, often through web capture	Device and virtual-camera signals; mobile SDK vs web
Account taken over after a clean onboarding	SIM swap, stolen credentials, social engineering of support	Changes to phone, email or payout account before the loss
Alert backlog growing every week	Customers grew faster than the team; rules never tuned	Alerts per analyst per day, and the share closed as false positives
Sanctions hit missed on a company	Screened the company but not its owners	Whether owners were screened, and aggregated under the 50% rule
Bank freezes new onboarding	A consent order at the bank, or your audit findings	The program agreement's approval clauses
Marketplace fined	Sellers over 200 sales and $5,000 not verified within 10 days	The seller verification queue and the 10-day timer