Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, January 15th.

Today on Forbes, AI fraud has exploded.

This background check startup is cashing in.

Running criminal records checks on Uber drivers and other gig workers helped Checker,

co-founder and CEO Daniel Janice grow his San Francisco-based background

checking startup into an operation with a $5 billion valuation. Now, a new wave of white-collar

fraud, powered by generative artificial intelligence, is supercharging the next stage of

checkers' growth. Janice says that at least

40% of job and loan applications, reviewed by his company, contained inaccurate or faked employment

or financial information, and fraudsters are increasingly using tools like chat GPT and Google's

Gemini to create increasingly convincing bogus documents like paystubs.

Janice told Forbes, quote,

This year is the first time we saw large-scale fraud happening in employment with some of those

sophisticated generative AI fake job candidates applying to small startups and large

companies.

Thanks to Checkers' expansion into white-collar employment history verification, its gross

revenue has grown to over $800 million, up 14% from $700 million in 2024.

Yonis said that the company has been profitable for several years, earning over $500 million

in net revenues, which excludes the fees it pays to the DMV and courthouses as part of its

background checks.

That growth and checkers' international expansion, it now works in 195 countries, means

that the business could be primed for an initial public offering.

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