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Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and this episode is all about synthetic

fraud, a new evolution of consumer fraud that's emerging in financial services to the tune

of $1 to $2 billion a year. In this episode, Neftali Harris, co-founder and CEO of Centilink,

which builds technology to detect and stop

synthetic fraud, talks to me, an A16Z operating partner for information security, Joel

De LaGarza, all about what this new kind of fraud is, including the life cycle of this long

con, how these synthetic identities get made, incubated, and finally busted out, and some of the wildest stories behind

the strange fraud rings he's seen. We also touch on why this new fraud is on the rise,

who the true victims are, and at the end of the day, what the foundational security issue

at the heart of it all truly is. We're here to talk about synthetic fraud, which I have to confess

I didn't even know what that really meant when we first started talking about it.

What does synthetic fraud even mean?

Almost no one hears about it in the public outside of financial services industry.

I hope that neither of you have been the victim of identity theft.

I have.

Okay.

I'm sorry to hear that.

And if you haven't, you probably know someone that has been. Right. And so the general public is very aware of identity theft because there's that consumer victim. With identity theft, you're stealing a real person's identity. Yeah. With synthetic fraud, you're saying, forget the real person. I'm going to make up a totally fake one. And that means like fake from the very ground up. Fake from the ground up.

...