Q: How can my rental company prevent identity and credit card fraud? — Aria Irani, operations analyst at Airport Van Rental

A: As we all know, fraud poses a triple threat to rental businesses: loss of income from the rental itself, loss or damage to their vehicles, and the potential loss or damage to third party property or people.

While no system can ever prevent fraud 100% of the time, products like the Access-IS IDauthenticator can help eliminate the majority of issues.

For as long as IDs and driver’s licenses have been around, so have fakes. We have all seen a fake ID; some of us might even have had one as a teenager! The bad ones are easy to spot while the good ones can be almost impossible to identify, especially if it’s a foreign passport, which you may only see a few times a year.

It’s for this reason that you shouldn’t rely on customer service agents to be your primary line of defense. Technology exists to take the guesswork out of the process. With a limited amount of training, your staff can pick out the poor fakes and even some of the reasonable ones.

ID readers support American and international identity documents, including driver’s licenses, ID cards, and passports, applying forensic document-specific tests to identify fakes.

More importantly, ID readers allow your staff to concentrate on the customer, which helps make the rental experience faster and less stressful. By doing so, customers are more likely to come back. And as any business professor will tell you, “repeat business is always easier to keep than new business is to win.”

ID readers examine the document using multiple light sources, including visible, ultraviolet (UV), and infrared (IR), as well as reading the barcodes and Machine Readable Zone (MRZ), communicating with the passports’ built-in chip when necessary. Checks include:

• Looking for damaged or missing security features.

• Comparing printed information (in all lights) with the library version of that document to ensure print patterns are correct.

• Ensuring printed information matches information contained in the barcode on the back of the driver’s license.

• Matching information on the chip and within the MRZ for passports, while confirming that the checksum calculation within the MRZ is correct.

Simultaneously, software taps into a large document library in real time to eliminate manual screening errors, speeding up inspection while reducing training, operating costs, and customer inconvenience.

Not only does the document reader carry out all of this checking, the software also extracts and then passes the customer data into your CRM system, preventing data entry errors in your customer records. By doing so, it helps speed up the entire registration process to enhance the overall customer experience.

With the knowledge that the renter’s ID document is valid and has been authenticated, double checking that the credit card has the same name as the renter’s ID card should help prevent the majority of identity fraud.