Apostille Korea obtains original loan documents and verifies them As contactless lending grows, loans are being approved on forged income documents that no one managed to screen out.

Apostille Korea has said it obtains the original certificates used in loan screening on behalf of lenders and verifies their authenticity. Income certificates and national and local tax clearance certificates are the papers lenders ask applicants to submit, but with dozens of applications a day, checking whether the documents themselves are forged is difficult.

Loan fraud that document screening alone cannot catch

Last month a savings bank caught a fraudulent loan application filed under a stolen identity just before approval. The application had cleared the first document review, but a staff member found it odd that an applicant whose address and workplace were both in Seoul had applied at a regional branch, visited the named person in person and discovered that a younger brother had applied using his elder brother's identity. The savings bank explained that tighter screening standards and accumulated know-how now filter out many fraudulent applications at the document review stage, but that with the growth of contactless lending, a determined applicant is often hard for staff to detect. Early this month a lender in the consumer credit business was defrauded by a customer. The customer had forged an income certificate and other papers, and the lender, unable to tell that they were forged, went ahead with the loan without noticing. After the repayment date passed it turned out that not only the documents but also the personal details had been falsified, and by then nothing could be undone.

Obtaining originals and verifying them as an alternative

The growth of contactless products, where a loan proceeds as long as the paperwork requirements are met, has been accompanied by fraud that exploits exactly that gap. During the loan process lenders ask applicants for income certificates and national and local tax clearance certificates. Yet with dozens of applications handled each day, simply reviewing the contents of the submitted papers takes all the available time, and whether the documents themselves are forged often goes unexamined. Without expert knowledge, authenticity cannot be judged by eye, and setting up a separate document verification system carries its own burden, which is why the industry says this side of lending remains exposed to fraud based on forged papers. Apostille Korea handles both the issuance of original loan screening documents, including income certificates and national and local tax clearance certificates, and the verification of their authenticity. Rather than accepting papers handed over by the applicant, the lender secures the originals at the issuing stage.

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Source: 폴리뉴스 · 2017-07-31