A Canadian company introduced a product for dealers to help prevent fraud during the online car shopping and financing process. Autocorp.ai is an Ottawa-based automotive fintech company specializing in virtual retail and commerce technologies.
“You have consumers that are using fake IDs to try to buy cars online or to book a test drive with a fake ID and they show up to the dealership, they test drive the car, and the car never comes back because it has been stolen,” said Autocorp.ai CEO Andrew Lemoine in an interview with Canadian auto dealer.
Autocorp.ai’s product is called AVA ID; it launched in Canada six weeks ago and so far 500 dealerships have subscribed to it.
Lemoine said that automotive fraud is a serious issue, noting that the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre’s data from March shows a 40 per cent increase from 2021 to 2022. One of the main contributing factors of this increase has to do with dealers that expanded their online presence during the COVID-19 pandemic—but without the proper safeguards in place.
“AVA ID checks secure and compliance for dealerships, but there’s also a huge fraud prevention component as well,” said Lemoine.
He said the dealers text a link to customers seeking to authenticate their identification by scanning their driver’s license and do a biometrics selfie check. “We build the technology with the consumer car-shopper experience online, but the dealers are the ones actually deploying it.”
Lemoine said there are many companies catering to fraud prevention, but few are doing it specifically for the automotive market—and even less with this specific technology.
“We’ve seen auto finance lenders start to use technology themselves when they are funding a deal, but our concept at Autocorp.ai is, why wait until the end to verify the ID when we can actually accomplish this up front online?” said Lemoine. “You don’t need to wait for the funding package. At that point, the bank is now chasing the consumer to verify their ID, or chasing the dealer to verify the ID when we could have taken care of this upfront around the same time the consumer is completing the credit application or trade evaluation. We are bringing it a lot sooner online.”
Lemoine said his company made a pledge to One Tree Planted for every subscription. Later this year, they plan to launch their product in the United States.
