On identity fraud, deepfakes, and the people stopping them.
A face. A passport. A fraud.
In the spring of 2025, ABN AMRO discovered something unsettling. A man had opened 47 bank accounts. Not in his own name, but in the names of others. He had collected their identity documents by posing as a landlord, requesting passports and ID cards from people who responded to his rental listings. Then he swapped the photos on those documents with manipulated images of his own face. The bank’s verification system saw a face and a passport. It let him through.
The victims? Ordinary people looking for a place to live. They had responded to a rental listing, sent over their passport as requested, and thought nothing more of it. They had no idea their identity was being used to open accounts, launder money, and commit fraud. Until the letters started arriving.
The man was eventually caught at a border crossing, multiple bank cards in his pocket. The prosecutor called for 30 months in prison. But the damage to the victims, blocked accounts, police visits, months of untangling, had already been done.
We share our faces every day
Think about how often you hand over your identity. A passport scan for a rental apartment. A selfie to open a bank account. A face scan to verify a loan. It has become completely normal. And completely unquestioned.
“If you leave your bike unlocked in the middle of Amsterdam, you expect it to be gone. But that’s exactly how we treat our faces.”
That’s Mark Evenblij, co-founder of DuckDuckGoose, describing a gap that criminals have already learned to exploit.
There are many examples. Take for instance Peter, a 71-year-old in the Netherlands. His complete digital profile was sold on a criminal marketplace. Accounts were opened in his name. Nearly €70,000 disappeared from his investment account. It took months to reclaim his “online life.”
What happens when someone becomes you
Identity fraud rarely announces itself. It tends to surface weeks or months later, when the damage is already done: a debt collector’s letter for a loan you never took, a knock on the door from the police about transactions you’ve never made. The average victim spends hundreds of hours, often over years, trying to undo the harm.
And crucially: they did nothing wrong. They just handed over their identity in a perfectly normal situation, and trusted that someone on the other side was checking.
DuckDuckGoose: the lock on the door
DuckDuckGoose builds explainable deepfake detection technology that strengthens digital identity and fraud prevention workflows. Its software analyses submitted images, video and audio for signs of AI-generated or manipulated content, returning a risk signal and forensic explanation that can support automated routing or human review. It is an essential layer within the broader identity, authentication, verification and anti-fraud stack.
In the second half of 2025, DuckDuckGoose analysed around 30 million deepfake checks in identity-related flows. Around 420,000 submissions were flagged as synthetic or manipulated, enabling customers to investigate, escalate and intervene before a potential fraud flow progresses.
“Behind every impersonation, there is a real person whose life gets complicated. We work to make sure that person never has to find out.”
Parya Lotfi, co-founder of DuckDuckGoose
Parya Lotfi, Mark Evenblij and Mohamed Ochalhi founded DuckDuckGoose with a clear conviction: the problem of manipulated digital identity is not going away. It’s accelerating. And the tools to address it need to scale at the same pace.
We’ve been here before
“Twenty years ago, almost nobody paid for antivirus software. It seemed optional. Until it wasn’t. That’s exactly where we are now with deepfake detection.” Mark Evenblij.
Mark Evenblij
Identity fraud detection is approaching that same inflection point. Digital-first banks are already there. Traditional financial institutions are following fast. The European Digital Identity Wallet is being introduced in stages, with EU Member States required to make at least one wallet available by the end of 2026. It is designed to make it easier for people to prove their identity and share verified attributes across public and private services. As reusable digital credentials become more widely used, the assurance of identity enrolment and the ability to recognise manipulated biometric or visual evidence become increasingly important. DuckDuckGoose contributes an explainable detection layer for high-risk identity flows, helping organisations identify potentially synthetic or manipulated content before it is relied upon in a decision.
Why Shaping Impact invests here
In Shaping Impact’s Theory of Change, DuckDuckGoose contributes to “increased access to transparent and trustworthy information”, part of a broader ambition to make institutional systems more inclusive, fairer, and safer.
DuckDuckGoose operates in a market at the point of structural change, and financial return and social impact are pointing in exactly the same direction. That is what Shaping Impact invests in.
