So, the technology for sharing fraud signals and fraud data has lagged quite far behind the rest of the technology world. A lot of it is still rooted in the 1990s and it comes from a world of very slow reporting cycles. You're often looking at maybe half a work day to write a fraud report and then weeks to get that fraud report actually upheld and added to the database so that it can help other people. That's partly because of the technology, that's partly because of the business model and the high reporting burdens.
It's essentially just a whole system that doesn't really work anymore for the speed that fraud is at today. So, it's not really a surprise to anyone that there is a heck of a lot more fraud today than there was even 12 months ago or six months ago. But the shape of that fraud looks different as well. The user behaviours have changed and the average user is far, far more savvy about fraud controls than they would have been even six months ago and willing to mess with them as well. I often think about the Online Safety Act in the UK as a good example of this.
That Act introduced age verification for any age-restricted content on the web and this now means that the kind of controls that people would have maybe used once every few years to apply for a mortgage or something, they're now going through several times a day to get on Roblox or access a porn website or something. And this greatly, greatly changes the game when it comes to the kind of attacks that we're trying to prevent.
We have essentially given nuclear weapons to teenagers and that means that the nature of the threat is far, far different to what today's solutions are intended to solve, intended to tackle. Fraudsters, when we see them, it's rarely the first time that they've struck. Most attacks have happened somewhere else first. So it is a really easy way to understand the risk of someone when they are at the front door of your business to know what they've been doing elsewhere first.
And that's not necessarily caring about what happens in someone else's business, although a lot of our customers really do care about that because they can see that the sector is stronger when it works together.
But if you can come up with a safe, secure, legal way to share that information that doesn't require a bunch of people to coordinate between each other, businesses that might not normally talk to each other, then you can get the benefits of that data sharing without any of the legal risk and, I guess, extra sort of operational burden that would normally come along with putting it into place. I worked on the coronavirus contact tracing app in Britain during the pandemic and we thought of what we were doing there as a kind of virtual or digital herd immunity that we were trying to build.
And I think that it's exactly the same principle with fraud data sharing. So there is an individual benefit to taking part in that ecosystem and that is, of course, the main reason that people do it. But there needs to be a system in place that makes it easy and legible to people that it becomes quite an easy decision to say, oh, okay, do I want to be part of this or not? And the individual benefits of being part of it outweigh the benefits of not being part of it and that's what we're trying to bring about.
There's a few kinds of complication to fraud data sharing, a few kinds of issues that normally come up. So one is the legal side. So we as a company, we operate in the UK and the UK is obviously aligned with the European Union where we follow GDPR and there are some pretty darn good legal bases to do this. Preventing fraud on your services is pretty unarguably a legal reason to share data.
Now, that doesn't make it necessarily easy to do in practice. I've worked with consortiums of customers who have tried to share fraud and the solution that they tend to come up with is essentially some kind of like shared Excel database or like dumb database if we're being glib about it. And that generally isn't enough. You do need the processes, the systems, the controls around it and that's really, really hard to build from scratch.
So what we tend to find when these initiatives are bespoke and homegrown for a particular existing group of customers, they tend to fall on their face because it's a heck of a lot to build up for the first time, to do it safely, to do it efficiently and make sure that everyone gets the benefit to make it worth doing still. But that's not to say that's insurmountable.
So the whole thing that we try and focus on as a company is providing that technological infrastructure and also providing the compliance infrastructure that wraps around it to make it a really simple, a really simple, OK, do we want to get in on this or not question for a business and to make the ROI really legible to them as well? I think that across the industry, that's what we need to move to.
We need to move to systems that provide the tech, but also provide that kind of wrap around legal and compliance layer that makes it a much simpler decision for a business to do this, because that's what we're going to need to in order to get the whole economy to the level we need it to be at. I think that there is a great big trend in our industry at the moment toward what I describe as ever closer scrutiny of pictures of passports, driving licenses, bank statements, utility bills. And this is often thought of as like digital verification, digital counterfraud, but it really isn't.
It's a paper based process that just happens to involve computers. And I think we're rapidly reaching the end of that paradigm. And over the next year, maybe two years, the whole industry across sectors is going to have to move to a proper natively digital paradigm for doing this. So I hope that people take a new appreciation for that new paradigm and try and approach the topic of how we verify identity, how we understand fraud risk, how we verify other things about the customers that come to our door in a data driven way from the start.
I think that's the way that we all need to be going, and I think hopefully that's what I'll imbue in people. In the world of professional wrestling, there's a concept called kayfabe, and kayfabe essentially is the idea that the wrestlers play characters, of course. Hopefully it's not a surprise to anyone that wrestling isn't real in that sense. But kayfabe is the idea that even when you're not in the ring, you're still playing that character, right? You're keeping up an act 24 sevens in some cases.
And I think a lot of what we do at the moment in the counterfraud world, in the verification world, is a kind of kayfabe, it's security theater, if you like. You know, we're doing these things to tick compliance checkboxes. Think of like checking utility bill to understand where someone lives. I would argue that there is basically no genuine security that comes from doing that anymore, and everyone kind of knows it deep down, but we still do it because where's the better alternative?
I think we're now in a world where there are better alternatives, data driven alternatives, real time alternatives. And I think that it's time that we started actually waking up to those alternatives and putting them into place because even the regulators are starting to say, this isn't good enough. We need to move past this and we need to do it sooner rather than later.
