The Next Great Grift

SENTILINK uses AI to help fight synthetic identity theft—fake people created to get real credit— and other novel forms of financial fraud. But its secret sauce is human insight.

- Jeff Kauflin

During the summer and fall of 2018, Hasan Hakim Brown, a Floridian in his early 40s, was applying online for loans-for the fake companies and bogus identities he'd set up. He had mixed success. He swindled more than $1 million from a Texas bank. But a few of his other targets, using software from San Francisco-based startup SentiLink, flagged his applications as suspicious because too many Social Security numbers were associated with the same address.

Brown, it turned out, had started manufacturing "synthetic identities"-stolen (but real) Social Security numbers merged with made-up names. He later refined his technique, buying a rig from an Atlanta computer consultant that let him simultaneously manage multiple virtual desktops from different IP addresses, thereby evading certain fraud-detection screens.

When Covid-19 hit in early 2020 and Congress appropriated hundreds of billions in forgivable Payroll Protection Program loans for hurting businesses, Brown was ready. Ultimately, according to federal court records, including guilty pleas, Brown and his half-dozen criminal associates controlled 700 synthetic identities and dozens of shell businesses and related bank accounts. Overall, the gang defrauded the Small Business Administration and various banks out of more than $20 million. Brown was sentenced to 60 months.

While Brown was busy thieving, SentiLink cofounders Naftali Harris and Maxwell Blumenfeld, both now 31, were also thinking about synthetic ID fraud, turning their early insights into a nicely growing niche business. "Everyone initially told us that this type of fraud was impossible, and that we must have misunderstood something," says CEO Harris.