My (Sort Of) Financial Identity Fraud Experience

I refrained from discussing this for a couple of days, but I was recently a victim of attempted financial identity fraud.

Well, SORT OF attempted identity fraud. I don’t know if this really counts, since I don’t know if the fraudster had my identity.

But the issue was resolved in less than 48 hours.

By the way, I have purposely changed the names of two of the companies I mention, to protect my PII. Which is a shame, because “Wildebeest Bank” went above and beyond in correcting the issue.

That doesn’t look right

Among its other services, Wildebeest Bank (not its real name) sends me an email whenever a purchase is made on my card, but my card is not present.

This is a fairly common occurrence. Among other things, my website, my business insurance, my business address, and my accounting software are all billed to my card.

But less than 48 hours ago, at 3:30 pm on Wednesday afternoon, I received an unexpected notice.

Your card was not present during a recent purchase

Your card was used to make a purchase at enron*publications us

We noticed your check card ending in 1234 was used to make a $8.48 purchase at enron*publications us today. The card wasn’t present at the time the purchase was made.

If you did not make this purchase, please call the nuber listed on the back of your card.

Log in to your account to review this transaction.

I didn’t recall making any $8.48 purchase, and once I looked up enron*publications us (not its real name), I realized that I definitely DIDN’T purchase anything from that company.

Before calling the bank, I double checked my account and found NO transaction for $8.48, even in a “pending” state.

So I called Wildebeest Bank

I called the number on the back of my card and connected with a woman in a call center who investigated why I got an email for a transaction that didn’t appear.

This is obviously not the Wildebeest Bank call center woman who helped me. But I’m sure she had a computer. By Earl Andrew at English Wikipedia – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17793658

After accessing several internal systems, the woman discovered that the purchase was attempted, but declined. The fraudster had my card account number, but didn’t have the correct expiration date.

Frankly, I’m not even sure if the fraudster had my name. Did the fraudster just punch in 16 digits and hope they would work?

Anyway, after this conversation, the woman from Wildebeest Bank transferred me to the fraud department.

The Fraud Department

So my call was transferred to the Fraud Department.

Not the man at Wildebeest Bank’s Fraud Department. And I bet the man who helped me didn’t have a cool beret like this guy. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=245337

The man at the Fraud Department advised me to cancel the card and get a new one.

I was wondering how long this would take, since one of bills was going to be charged to my card in the next two weeks, and I didn’t want any hiccup from a denied card purchase.

Anti-Fraud Man explained that if I could go to a Wildebeest Bank branch by the next day (Thursday), I could get a new card immediately.

“Could I go today?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied.

It was about 3:50 pm by that time, or 20 minutes since I received the initial email.

So I drove to the bank

I hopped in my car, drove to a local bank branch, and went to a desk.

Not the real person who helped me at my bank branch, but the real person was nice also. By Melwinsy – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35660323.

You may recall that I started Bredemarket in the fall of 2020, right in the middle of COVID. When I opened my account, the bank WOULDN’T let me go to my local bank branch and I had to open the account remotely. Since then I’ve been in the bank branch several times; it’s a nice place.

Anyway, the fraud department had already cancelled my compromised card, so the man at the bank branch only had to issue me a temporary card and guide me through its activation. This temporary card would last me until the new card arrived in the mail. It had the same card number as the new card so I could temporarily use it for purchases, but the permanent card would have a different expiration date and security code.

I could have provided the temporary card’s number, expiration date, and security code to the company that was going to bill me in two weeks, but I preferred to wait until I received the permanent card. I asked the man at the bank branch how long that would take.

“I can expedite it,” he said.

I get a present at Box 259

Less than 48 hours later, on Friday morning, I was notified that I had a package at my business address.

Bredemarket’s mailing address is 1030 N Mountain Ave #259, Ontario CA 91762-2114.

As I guessed, it was the permanent card, which I immediately activated and provided to the companies that auto-bill me via my card.

Here’s the short version:

  • My bank (“Wildebeest Bank”) notified me of a questionable “card not present” purchase (from “enron*publications us”) at 3:30 pm on Wednesday.
  • By 3:50 pm (20 minutes later), the bank told me that the attempted purchase was declined, but cancelled the bank card anyway.
  • By 4:15 pm (45 minutes later), I had a new temporary bank card.
  • By Friday at noon (less than 48 hours later), I had my permanent bank card.

So everyone be sure to bank at Wildebeest Bank. No confusion when you bank with them!

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744.

The Pros and Cons of Age Estimation

By NikosLikomitros – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=136366736

I just published the latest edition of “The Wildebeest Speaks,” Bredemarket’s monthly LinkedIn newsletter.

To be honest, “The Pros and Cons of Age Estimation” repurposes some content I’ve already published in the Bredemarket blog, namely:

The net result? An article explaining both the advantages and disadvantages of age estimation.

Take a chance to read the article, published by LinkedIn’s Bredemarket account. And if you’re a LinkedIn member, subscribe to the newsletter.

Cutting Through the Fog


Buonasera • CC BY-SA 3.0

How can your productmarketing message cut through the fog and get results vs. your competitors’ me-too messaging?

Two tips when planning and creating content:

  • When planning, the first question to ask is why. Once you know your product’s (or company’s) why, everything else just flows naturally.
  • When creating, call your first draft 0.5. Don’t show it to anyone. Between draft 0.5 and draft 1, take the razor out and cut ruthlessly.

Age Estimation Via Dorsal Hand Features? Wait and See.

Vendors and researchers are paying a lot of attention to estimating ages by using a person’s face, and all of us are awaiting NIST’s results on its age estimation tests.

But are there other ways to estimate ages?

But how old is the tree shrew? By W. Djatmiko – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1239588.

As Biometric Update reports, a recent Experimental Dermatology study (“Predicting human chronological age via AI analysis of dorsal hand versus facial images: A study in a cohort of Indian females“) looks at hand features (specifically from the back of the hand, not the palm side) as an alternative method of age estimation (as opposed to using face features as many vendors do today).

From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/exd.15045.

But before you declare dorsal hand features as the solution to age estimation, consider:

  • As the title states, the study only looked at females. No idea if my masculine hand features are predictive. (Anecdotally, more males work at tasks such as bricklaying that affect the hands, including the knuckle texture that was highlighted in the study.)
  • As the title states, the study only looked at people from India. No idea if my American/German/English/etc. hand features are predictive. (To be fair, the subjects had a variety of skin tones.)
  • The study only had 1454 subjects. Better than a study that used less than 20 people, but still not enough. More research is needed.

And even with all of that, the mean absolute error in age estimation was over 4 years.

Before taking a headline as fact, you have to know which questions to ask.

LMM vs. LMM (Acronyms Are Funner)

Do you recall my October 2023 post “LLM vs. LMM (Acronyms Are Fun)“?

It discussed both large language models and large multimodal models. In this case “multimodal” is used in a way that I normally DON’T use it, namely to refer to the different modes in which humans interact (text, images, sounds, videos). Of course, I gravitated to a discussion in which an image of a person’s face was one of the modes.

Document processing with GPT-4V. The model’s mistake is highlighted in red. From https://huyenchip.com/2023/10/10/multimodal.html?utm_source=tldrai.

In this post I will look at LMMs…and I will also look at LMMs. There’s a difference. And a ton of power when LMMs and LMMs work together for the common good.

Revisiting the Large Multimodal Model (LMM)

From https://zapier.com/blog/multimodal-ai/.

Since I wrote that piece last year, large multimodal models continue to be discussed. Harry Guinness just wrote a piece for Zapier in March.

When Google announced its Gemini series of AI models, it made a big deal about how they were “natively multimodal.” Instead of having different modules tacked on to give the appearance of multimodality, they were apparently trained from the start to be able to handle text, images, audio, video, and more. 

Other AI models are starting to function in a TRULY multimodal way, rather than using separate models to handle the different modes.

So now that we know that LLMs are large multimodal models, we need to…

…um, wait a minute…

Introducing the Large Medical Model (LMM)

It turns out that the health people have a DIFFERENT definition of the acronym LMM. Rather than using it to refer to a large multimodal model, they refer to a large MEDICAL model.

As you can probably guess, the GenHealth.AI model is trained for medical purposes.

Our first of a kind Large Medical Model or LMM for short is a type of machine learning model that is specifically designed for healthcare and medical purposes. It is trained on a large dataset of medical records, claims, and other healthcare information including ICD, CPT, RxNorm, Claim Approvals/Denials, price and cost information, etc.

I don’t think I’m stepping out on a limb if I state that medical records cannot be classified as “natural” language. So the GenHealth.AI model is trained specifically on those attributes found in medical records, and not on people hemming and hawing and asking what a Pekingese dog looks like.

But there is still more work to do.

What about the LMM that is also an LMM?

Unless I’m missing something, the Large Medical Model described above is designed to work with only one mode of data, textual data.

But what if the Large Medical Model were also a Large Multimodal Model?

By Piotr Bodzek, MD – Uploaded from http://www.ginbytom.slam.katowice.pl/25.html with author permission., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=372117
  • Rather than converting a medical professional’s voice notes to text, the LMM-LMM would work directly with the voice data. This could lead to increased accuracy: compare the tone of voice of an offhand comment “This doesn’t look good” with the tone of voice of a shocked comment “This doesn’t look good.” They appear the same when reduced to text format, but the original voice data conveys significant differences.
  • Rather than just using the textual codes associated with an X-ray, the LMM-LMM would read the X-ray itself. If the image model has adequate training, it will again pick up subtleties in the X-ray data that are not present when the data is reduced to a single medical code.
  • In short, the LMM-LMM (large medical model-large multimodal model) would accept ALL the medical outputs: text, voice, image, video, biometric readings, and everything else. And the LMM-LMM would deal with all of it natively, increasing the speed and accuracy of healthcare by removing the need to convert everything to textual codes.

A tall order, but imagine how healthcare would be revolutionized if you didn’t have to convert everything into text format to get things done. And if you could use the actual image, video, audio, or other data rather than someone’s textual summation of it.

Obviously you’d need a ton of training data to develop an LMM-LMM that could perform all these tasks. And you’d have to obtain the training data in a way that conforms to privacy requirements: in this case protected health information (PHI) requirements such as HIPAA requirements.

But if someone successfully pulls this off, the benefits are enormous.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

Robert Young (“Marcus Welby”) and Jane Wyatt (“Margaret Anderson” on a different show). By ABC TelevisionUploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia – eBay itemphoto informationTransferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16472486.

Do As I Say…

I have worked with demand generation and growth marketing leader Gene Volfe, both as employees of the same company and as independent consultants working for other companies.

I asked him to review a short technology piece that I wrote, and he immediately found two gaps:

From https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/3-takeaways-from-start-with-why.
  • My piece did not explain the “why.”
  • My piece did not adequately differentiate the product in question from other products.

Hmm…if only there were things that I could read that could help me do these things.

Oh, wait…

Differentiating Your Company and Your Products/Services (April 9, 2024).

Do as I say, and not as I DON’T.

HubSpot Content Marketing (Re)Certification: An Achievement, A Game, or Both?

I have just renewed my HubSpot Content Marketing Certification for another two years.

John Bredehoft Content Marketing Certification, now expires June 5 2026. See https://app.hubspot.com/academy/achievements/s17pbsb4/en/1/john-bredehoft/content-marketing.

So perhaps this is a good time to ask the question: do certifications matter?

Does my HubSpot certification, or my graduate degree, or my undergraduate degree, or the super-secret certification that I’m still pursuing (more later), anything more than a (digital) piece of paper to hang on the wall? Is this a substantive achievement, or does it just show that I was successful playing the certification game?

My HubSpot certification only has true meaning if I use the knowledge while creating content.

If I don’t use the knowledge, then it’s just like some of Enron’s corporate awards:

  • “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” 1999, 2000, and 2001
  • Fortune’s All-Star List of Global Most Admired Companies — 2000
  • Ten Stocks to Last the Decade

Now back to my super-secret certification…

Defeating Synthetic Identity Fraud

I’ve talked about synthetic identity fraud a lot in the Bredemarket blog over the past several years. I’ll summarize a few examples in this post, talk about how to fight synthetic identity fraud, and wrap up by suggesting how to get the word out about your anti-synthetic identity solution.

But first let’s look at a few examples of synthetic identity.

Synthetic identities pop up everywhere

As far back as December 2020, I discussed Kris’ Rides’ encounter with a synthetic employee from a company with a number of synthetic employees (many of who were young females).

More recently, I discussed attempts to create synthetic identities using gummy fingers and fake/fraudulent voices. The topic of deepfakes continues to be hot across all biometric modalities.

From https://www.candynation.com/gummy-fingers

I shared a video I created about synthetic identities and their use to create fraudulent financial identities.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDrSBlDJVCk.

I even discussed Kelly Shepherd, the fake vegan mom created by HBO executive Casey Bloys to respond to HBO critics.

From https://twitter.com/KellySh33889356.

And that’s just some of what Bredemarket has written about synthetic identity. You can find the complete list of my synthetic identity posts here.

So what? You must fight!

It isn’t enough to talk about the fact that synthetic identities exist: sometimes for innocent reasons, sometimes for outright fraudulent reasons.

You need to communicate how to fight synthetic identities, especially if your firm offers an anti-fraud solution.

Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=607428.

Here are four ways to fight synthetic identities:

  1. Checking the purported identity against private databases, such as credit records.
  2. Checking the person’s driver’s license or other government document to ensure it’s real and not a fake.
  3. Checking the purported identity against government databases, such as driver’s license databases. (What if the person presents a real driver’s license, but that license was subsequently revoked?)
  4. Perform a “who you are” biometric test against the purported identity.

If you conduct all four tests, then you have used multiple factors of authentication to confirm that the person is who they say they are. If the identity is synthetic, chances are the purported person will fail at least one of these tests.

Do you fight synthetic identity fraud?

If you fight synthetic identity fraud, you should let people know about your solution.

Perhaps you can use Bredemarket, the identity content marketing expert. I work with you (and I have worked with others) to ensure that your content meets your awareness, consideration, and/or conversion goals.

How can I work with you to communicate your firm’s anti-synthetic identity message? For example, I can apply my identity/biometric blog expert knowledge to create an identity blog post for your firm. Blog posts provide an immediate business impact to your firm, and are easy to reshare and repurpose. For B2B needs, LinkedIn articles provide similar benefits.

If Bredemarket can help your firm convey your message about synthetic identity, let’s talk.

Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

Content Marketing and Proposals are Pretty Much the Same

I’ve taken a very small break from my identity blog post writing business to help a biometric company with a proposal. I am, after all, the biometric proposal writing expert, so I’m at home working on identity proposals. After all, I’ve done it before.

This is NOT a depiction of the bidders’ conference I attended in Connecticut 20 or so years ago. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15798710

Bredemarket’s services are grouped into two distinct and separate functions: content marketing (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and proposals (RFI responses, RFP responses, sole source letters, etc.).

My division of my services makes sense in the real world. After all, in some employment situations, content marketing and proposals employ distinct and separate sets of employees.

The last Association of Proposal Management Professionals Conference I attended, in Chicago in May 2014. From https://www.apmp.org/assets/apmp-annual_report-2014_final.pdf.

But other companies are different. In fact, I’ve seen employment ads seeking marketing/proposals managers. Sounds like a lot of work, unless the company submits few proposals or performs minimal marketing.

And in many companies there are NOT dedicated proposals specialists. Which is why Bredemarket makes its money by helping the salespeople at these firms get the documents out.

Time for the truth

And if we’re truthful with ourselves, content marketing and proposals are pretty much the same thing.

I know this angers some people, who insist that they are content marketing professionals or proposal professionals, with all the proper certifications that a mere mortal could never attain. Or they did attain it, but it lapsed. Or is about to lapse unless I renew it in time.

But hear me out. I’m going to list four aspects of a particular document, and you tell me whether I’m talking about a piece of marketing content, or a proposal.

  1. The document focuses on the customer’s needs.
  2. The document describes benefits the customer will realize.
  3. The document targets one or more sets of people hungry for the solution.
  4. The document shall be in Aptos 12 point, single spaced, with 1 inch margins, and shall not exceed 20 pages.

Guess what? From that description you CAN’T tell if it’s a piece of content or a proposal.

Yes, I know some of you thought item 4 was a dead giveaway because it sounded like an RFP requirement, but maybe some company’s brand guidelines dictate that the firm’s white papers must conform to that format. You never know.

And I know that when you get into the minutiae, there are certain things that proposal writers do that content marketers don’t have to worry about, and vice versa.

But at a high level, the content marketer already knows 90% of the things they need to know to write proposals. And vice versa.

Can we all get along?

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sONfxPCTU0.