Financial fraud is here to stay, unfortunately, and it comes in many different forms.

Credit card fraud isn’t quite as sexy as ransomware, but it’s still a huge, money-sucking criminal enterprise, and it’s unlikely giving up that cash cow is one of the resolutions fraudsters made for the new year. So how do companies react?

“Fraud up until nowadays has been a black box—the outcome from a fraud interaction has been a number, and companies don’t really know what that number means,” said Pat Phelan, senior vice president for TransUnion, a credit and information management service which provides its clients with credit protection services . “We give [companies] all of the underlying data—that transparency allows us to sort of un-black-box a fraud decision.”

According TransUnion data, during the course of 2016, businesses lost over $1.6 billion dollars to fraudsters whose preferred method of choice was credit card application fraud.

TransUnion today revealed its IDVision service, a collection of identity and authentication solutions that interpret different data points to stop fraud.

The service targets problems such as separating “synthetic identity,” that is, a computer-generated identity created for the sole purpose of fraudulent activity, from an actual identity. This is a problem that has gotten more and more complex as criminals have become better and better at faking the latter.

According to Mary Ann Miller, Senior Director, Fraud Executive Advisor & Industry Relations for NICE Actimize on the company’s blog, identity theft is definitely not slowing down any time soon:

As we all know, fraudsters send the proceeds of their fraudulent actions to a “mule” account to “cash out”. As faster payments increases these attacks, the fraudsters will be in the business of setting up “speedy” mule accounts as well. Consumers are often “duped” into becoming mules, by way of social engineering of vulnerable consumers who fall for “work from home” scams or “romance” scams.

IDVision is also designed to solve the problem of “loan stacking,” in which fraudsters will simultaneously apply for four or five different loans from different online lenders, often accepting all of the offers and then defaulting with no attempt at a first payment, according to Phelan. As one might imagine, this is of particular concern for online lenders.

“We’re looking to see that the ID didn’t pop up within the last 30 days, that it hasn’t stacked any loans—we’re looking for a complete 360 of that identity,” said Phelan, who also noted that over $50 billion was lost to synthetic identity fraud last year.

Like fintech itself, financial fraud is an area that’s never going to stop developing, and with more and more consumers asking for more control over their financial data, it’s an area financial services institutions will have to remain vigilant, and even learn new ways to defend customers against emerging threats.

To learn more about fraud solutions, join us in San Jose on March 6-7 for Bank Innovation 2017, where the best conversations in fintech take place. Please request your invitation here.