Girl Meets SXSW: Taking on a $75 Billion Problem

Listen in to this special episode taped live at this year's Inc. Magazine Founder's House at SXSW in Austin, where Kalie appeared as a panelist to discuss how her new app Fuzzy is helping the fight against online identity fraud and the $75 Billion deception economy that results from it.   The panel is hosted by award-winning journalist Abigail Bassett of Inc. Custom Studios.   You can also check out Kalie's Inc. article here: https://www.inc.com/custom/fuzzy-qualified-digital.

Season 2 of Just Lookin' Out will be coming summer!

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Transcript

Abigail Bassett 0:00

Thank you. I'm Abigail Bassett, your host for this custom podcast episode from Inc. Custom Studio, Fuzzy, and Qualified Digital. Today, we're going to talk about the $75 billion deception economy, where fraudsters use fake identities to scam all types of customers, especially on dating apps. In fact, an estimated 1 in 10 dating profiles is fake. And now, with advances in AI, those fake profiles and falsified information are even more difficult to detect. That's where Fuzzy comes in. This new app helps prevent fraud by helping you verify that people are who they say We'll be right back. Kaylee, I want to start with you. Let's talk about what is Fuzzy and how did this whole idea start. Sure. Well, first off,

Kalie Nitzsche 1:13

I want to say that I'm a native Texan. So howdy, y'all. And I'm really excited to be here. Great to be with you, Abby. Thank you, Inc. Founders House, for having us. It's kind of a surreal moment for me. I never thought that I would be on a stage like this, but I'm so excited. And the thing about Fuzzy, the app that I built, is that the genesis of it is from my own experience. And I wanted to find love, and so I got on the dating apps in my mid-30s. And unfortunately, I fell victim to deception. And I was lied to on basically every single fact that a person can be lied to. Name, education, profession, you name it, he lied about it. And it was devastating. It was heartbreaking. But instead of just deciding not to get out of bed every day, I finished that red glass of wine, and I decided I was going to do something about it because it is just not OK. Thank you. Thank you. So this happened to me, and I started to do some research. I was like, surely maybe I just don't know that this technology is out there. I started looking around, and I realized really quickly there was no quick, affordable way to validate somebody online. And I got to work, and I turned my heartbreak into action, And Fuzzy, the app was born, the idea. And I realized really quickly in order to bring this amazing idea to life, I needed to find an incredible partner, not only from a technology perspective, but also from an advisory perspective. And Jackie Saleem with Qualified Digital was my number one choice.

Abigail Bassett 2:58

So, Jackie, tell me a little bit about, you know, there's a lot of stigma around looking people up. Like, if you're on the dating apps and you're not, like, Googling these people, you're putting yourself at risk, right? But there's still a lot of stigma around, you know, digging around on Google or whatever you choose to use to be able to find out information. So, you know, why is that, why does that persist? And what makes Fuzzy different from sort of that, like, very doom and gloom kind of like you're stalking someone online?

Jaqi Saleem 3:28

Um, Great question. I mean, one of the first things that I said when Kalie approached us to work on the app is we don't want to be the Norton antivirus of dating. We want to make sure that what we're doing is optimistic and about finding love, not about grievances. And so I think a lot of it goes back to when we were analog, and people would hire a private investigator or something to go see if someone was cheating. And as we evolved to the digital age, it's become more accessible, right? And we even use language like, oh, I went online and stalked him. And we're joking, but it brings something like a stigma to the table. And really, when you look at the statistics, and I won't give you all of them today, but they're horrifying, people absolutely should be doing research online for people that they haven't met before, especially when they're gonna be, no notes, especially when they're gonna be putting their heart out there. So, you know, one of the things that we really thought was important is a lot of like background check software. It gives you kind of this white piece of paper and it gives like address and phone number and all these things that people shouldn't actually have access to. And what we did is we actually modeled it off the look of a dating profile, except for that the information is populated from valid data sources as opposed to giving the control to the people who are creating the profile. So you can't really be a fake. We're going to pull that information in and we're going to give the information that's relevant to the people who are searching.

Abigail Bassett 5:14

And Kalie, just walk me through how the app works. Once this launches, what does it look like? How does this work? If I'm on the dating apps and I go to a date, how do I verify that the person I'm meeting is actually who they say they are?

Kalie Nitzsche 5:28

Yeah. So this is going to be a joint question because, um, I'm not, I'm not the very tech savvy guru here. It's Jackie, but what I am is I'm the end user and I want an incredible experience. And what I mean by that is I want this app to be easy to use. I want very low input for maximum output. If I'm on a dating app, which I am, I'm going to be on my couch, you know, with a glass of red wine, my kids in bed, I'm scrolling through, I'm generally doing a lot of swiping left, and I want Fuzzy to be something that pulls these results into an aggregation in less than five seconds, and I want the results to be accurate. I need something that I can rely on to make decisions based off of what's safest for myself. From a technology perspective, I'll give that one to Jackie, because her team is actually the one that created it.

Jaqi Saleem 6:22

Thank you, Kalie. when we first went to creating the technology we thought about what do you have at the beginning of dating somebody right so we just said name age and location and so we built the entire product around taking those small bits of information along with using facial recognition because you generally have photos and we've taken it and we've gone through a lot of different data sources that exist but they're not collated around the idea. So there's HR software to do background checks on people. There's a background check for something else. There's information on Google. You can find if someone's using your likeness or someone's likeness on different social media profiles. So we basically built a tool to say, we're going to take this information and we're going to do the hard work and bring back the information to the end user so that they can catch some of those things that Kaylee talked about in the degrees, you know, lied in every single possible way and bring it to the end user.

Kalie Nitzsche 7:33

Oh, and by the way, our secret sauce is patent pending. It's called ADD, automated deception discovery. And essentially what it's doing is it's looking at what someone's claiming to be true, whether that be the facts in their profile or the way that their images are display, et cetera. And then it's putting our algorithm against it. to see if there's any inconsistencies in the truth. And if there are, with Fuzzy, and this is what makes us truly remarkable, we're really about transparency. We're gonna give you the data to go say, hey, this is where we're seeing an inconsistency. Now you have the information to go do your own level of due diligence to put yourself in a safer position.

Abigail Bassett 8:18

And what other applications might this have, right? Because I can see opportunities for other businesses outside of just dating, right? where something like Fuzzy would be really valuable just because we have seen such a huge uptick in things like online scams and pig butchering scams and all kinds of online AI usage that's really sort of hiding the ball, if you will.

Kalie Nitzsche 8:42

Absolutely. So when we talk about pig butchering alone, we're looking at a $75 billion loss in financial scams that have happened over the last four years. That is truly staggering. But when we look at things from outside of the dating apps, because I'm sure there's some of you sitting in here thinking, well, I would never use Fuzzy. I'm happily married or I'm not on the apps. Good for you. I would then say, actually, Fuzzy can be used for a lot of everyday circumstances. And what I mean that is I'm a single mom. I'm constantly in need of new babysitters and people to come over and help me build IKEA furniture or whatever that looks like. And it's funny because over the holidays, and this is the most Midwest story you'll hear today, But my neighbor came over with banana nut bread that she had cooked me. And she found out that I was coming out with this app. And she's like, oh, but I'll never use it. I need to get back. I have a new housekeeper. And I kind of thought, I want to keep this woman at my house for a couple more minutes. And I could see she was getting antsy to get home because she had someone new in her house. And so finally she hands me the bread. She can't wait to get out of my doorstep. And I said, hey, Barbara, remember how you told me earlier you're, you know, you have someone new in your home, but you would never use fuzzy. And she said, yes. And I said, you could have fuzzied her before she came over. And then we could be sitting on my couch right now. And it was as though a light bulb went off in this woman's head to think, wow, we could be using this for any online connection that we have. And then just doing a quick due diligence to make sure that you're in a safer position, which is so important.

Abigail Bassett 10:20

And one of the technologies that you guys are employing is actually AI to check AI. And Jackie, tell me how that works. I mean, it's It sounds very self-reflexive, it sounds a little bit like the snake eating its own tail, but how does that work and how does that make users safer when they use Fuzzy?

Speaker 01 10:38

Yeah, you're much better at speaking into the microphone than I am. Thank you. You're welcome. One of the things that people actually bring up a lot is, is AI perpetuating the problem? And it is, but I think it's much more more of a solution than it is a problem. It's easy to make videos and images with AI. It's also super easy to find images and videos created by AI. And what we're doing is not only using AI on facial recognition, being able to tell if somebody's the age that they say they are, but we're also doing things like sentiment analysis. So if there are tenants of someone who has narcissistic behavior, right? We've basically trained it to say, listen, put your text thread through this and we'll let you know if the conversations that you're having is somebody who is leaning more narcissistic than not. And many other applications, but really just being able to help detect that. Thank you.

Speaker 00 11:46

And fun fact, the number one thing a narcissist tends to stay in a dating app is your mind. So if you're getting that particular message, run away.

Speaker 01 11:57

Also, if you saw the number of selfies that went over, it was very impressive.

Speaker 02 12:02

Well, wait, I'm going to follow up on that because is there sort of an algorithmic relationship between the number of selfies and certain, when combined with the text analysis that you guys are doing, that you can pull out and say, oh, hey, this is a high incidence of narcissistic behavior or other sort of non-appealing behaviors that could be, say, controlling or potentially dangerous for anybody on the app?

Speaker 01 12:27

Absolutely. And really, it's going to look also and see, are you also posting selfies back? Or is that person just going right at you? But generally, they're not going to ask you a lot of questions about you. They're going to tell you a lot about them. And they're going to try to adapt to everything that you like versus actually having a real truth about who they are. There's definitely a lot of different traits. But yes, taking pictures of yourself every morning and sending it to you with a sexy face is

Speaker 02 12:56

definitely a marker.

Speaker 01 12:57

One of them. One of

Speaker 02 12:58

them, okay. So when you combine it and you run it through some of the algorithms and stuff that you guys have put together, you are able to detect that and just say to a user, be like, hey, just FYI, like, no judgment, but just so you know, right?

Speaker 01 13:12

There are eight out of ten. Right.

Speaker 02 13:14

The possibility of a narcissist is very high. Yeah. Sorry,

Speaker 00 13:19

Kaylee, you were going to say something. No, I was just going to say, and on the complete flip side of that, right, you're getting this guy that's sending all the selfies, but how do I predict protect my own online likeness, which is so important because right now, as technology only continues to get more complex and grow, we don't necessarily have a way to easily have autonomy or management over our online meta selves. And so once you verify yourself through Fuzzy and you become part of our amazing community that we're trying to build, we can then say, hey, Jackie, we already have your facial recognition and we have detected your picture in this profile. And before that, there's a very high likelihood that Jackie did not know that. Now she can go and control that and have that information in hand.

Speaker 02 14:08

So it's really interesting that you bring that up because it's actually happened to me where someone has scraped my profile and remade another profile, stolen a bunch of pictures, or taken when I was on Twitter before it got what it is now. Sorry. Truth. But before it was... It's not Twitter at all. It's not Twitter anymore. It's not what it was. And I had had a few times where people had stolen, you know, some of my Twitter profile stuff because I was verified and all these things. And I'm curious, Kaylee, you looked at this space and you sort of saw an opportunity. Why hasn't there been something like this before given how constantly online and connected we all are?

Speaker 00 14:48

That is an excellent question because I seriously, when I say that I was baffled not to find something, I thought for sure I had this idea, and I would stumble upon the technology already existed, and then it was like, wah, wah. My one idea that I've come up with, there's already tech out there. And I just could not believe that that did not exist. And the norm today, when we're trying to vet somebody online, what is the first place that we do? We go to Google, and we start looking at every article we can. We try to find all of the various social profiles that this individual might have. And from there, we do our own, okay, well, I think this is who this person is, and that's really all we have today. And I thought, that is just not acceptable, especially because we live in a digital-only world. We need to be digitally safe. And that's really how Fuzzy's trying to be a revolutionary here in the online economy deception space.

Speaker 01 15:50

I would also just add, it's really hard. I mean, it's a lot of work, and it's super complicated, complicated to be able to collate all this data and make sure that it is actually the same person that you're working with. And so I gander that people probably tried. We've seen a few things out there where they have, but we've just been able to really tie together systems, QA it, and ensure that all this data can come together and give that real-time profile of someone.

Speaker 02 16:21

And just out of curiosity, is that sort of at the nexus of where we are right now in terms of the advancement of technology technology, the adoption of AI, the sort of comfort that most people have with it, has the technology just gotten that good at this point that's sort of enabled this to be possible?

Speaker 01 16:36

I mean, we built something that good. No, I mean, I think that really the value is taking technologies that exist out there and data sources that exist out there that are disparate and not built for this and pulling them together. And with AI, obviously, there's a lot more that we can do now that we weren't able to do previously.

Speaker 02 17:00

How do you determine what's valuable to a Fuzzy user versus what's not? Because there is so much data on the internet. If you just put somebody's name, age, and location into a search engine, it's likely to throw up a lot of stuff.

Speaker 01 17:15

We looked at that in two parts. First of all, there's a lot of information that we can get back that makes someone unsafe, so we weren't going to post that up there. also lucky for us, not so lucky for us, but we had kind of a patient zero

Speaker 00 17:31

story with- We call him the Wuhan bat. So that's what we'll refer to him as moving forward. I feel like there's a story

Speaker 01 17:41

there. I've never used that, but yeah, but we actually had that. And really our goal is to put this out there and have people give us information about things that have happened to them so we can build more safeguards. But it is really important to us to not make it easier to make people targets. So putting things out like address and phone number is something we've stayed away from, even though it's really accessible.

Speaker 02 18:09

And I was going to say, how did you guys how did you from your experience with the Wuhan bat, if you don't mind me using don't mind at all, like how how did you determine specifically like this is valuable? This would have been valuable to me in my own experience versus like this is sort of, you know, not relevant to what I need to know.

Speaker 00 18:31

Sure. So for me, you know, it was really embarrassing and I was ashamed. I had brought this man to meet my family. I paraded him around the 4th of July barbecue we had and I introduced him to my beautiful six-year-old and I met this man's kids. I mean, I literally felt that I was falling in love with somebody that I really was looking for. He checked all my boxes and it was actually I was on a flight back from my old job and I got to thinking well what would it have taken for me to have never gone on that first date so that he could get me into his little web you know and it was marriage license and then I got to thinking well marriage license is publicly accessible information it's just really hard to find there's 3,500 counties in the United States alone so how does one go to every county just to check for for a marriage license. And then I realized, well, technology has advanced so far, I'm sure we could get there. And Jackie and I have actually discovered that the transparency when it comes to public records, particularly around criminal records, it is not good enough. There's a lot of state legislation that just backs up the ability to accessing both federal and misdemeanors. And Jackie and I are honestly really looking at this from a legislative perspective, How do we make this data more easy to get? Because you deserve to know if somebody's an armed robber. You deserve to know if there is domestic violence there. And we are literally creating an application where we're trying to change the way that we accept what's okay when it comes to criminal record data. Go

Speaker 02 20:19

ahead. I was going to say, you know, when what happened to you happened to you, you went to a Facebook page to discover all this, right? I did, yes. And instead of having to go to a Facebook page, now this is all going to be kind of in the palm of your hand, right?

Speaker 01 20:36

Yeah, the Facebook page is really great to catch somebody after, but it's not proactive. And that was one of the big things we were thinking about when we were doing it. And another thing is we actually believe very strongly that there are more good actors than there are bad actors. So we were thinking a lot about how do we actually have someone catch get verified themselves. There's a lot of technology out there where you can use an ID, use your own face to say that you are the real Slim Shady, right? And then what we did is we got that back from the same technology that people use for banking software. And then we get a positive that the person is who they are. And if you move, by the way, it knows it. And it will give you information back on that. But it allows people to say, you know what, I feel comfortable making someone else feel comfortable with me, so I'm going to verify myself. And behind that is a real-time QR code, and what we mean by that is every 90 seconds it changes, so nobody can take a screenshot of their QR code and somebody can go out and be them. Only the person with the app can have it, and it will change every 90 seconds.

Speaker 02 21:51

So it's kind of like an authenticator for who you are, essentially.

Speaker 01 21:54

Yeah, and as Kaylee was talking about, all these different other... cases, if somebody's coming in to fix your sink, you can ask them just to show their own verified profile. Right.

Speaker 00 22:05

And when you think about it from a B2B perspective, the opportunities are endless. My dad, he actually went from corporate America and became an entrepreneur. So that's kind of what I saw growing up. And he ran a painting and construction business where he had a ton of 1099 employees that he didn't necessarily have the time or money to do full background checks but it would have been really nice had he had some quick affordable tool to verify an individual and I just want to say one thing and piggyback off of what Jackie said because it's incredibly important for me to convey there are a lot of good humans out there and we are trying to let them find each other and connect in a very safe way the word fuzzy literally came because if something's fuzzy it needs more clarity and And with more clarity, that something can be beautiful. And you can meet and you can have love and you can make a new roommate or have a connection. But with more information, it actually can be dark and scary. And we want to make sure that you have that information as well. So Fuzzy really stems from the fact that we do believe in people. It's just unfortunate that there are bad actors out there. Let's stay away from them. Let's build a safe community.

Speaker 01 23:20

And guess what? They're not verifying themselves.

Speaker 02 23:24

I would imagine no criminal is going to be like, oh, guess what? verify myself and say that I'm actually this person.

Speaker 00 23:28

The biggest thing moving forward that I'm telling girls on the apps is if you say, hey, can you fuzzy verify? And if their answer is no, that is a red flag. That is the new red flag, right? Because they are hiding something. The good dudes, they're going to go and be proactive here and say, hey, I have nothing to hide. You know, I'm a handyman. I want everybody to feel comfortable with me coming into your home. I'm a new babysitter, et cetera, no matter what that looks like. So So why don't we all do this verification system and build this community out, and it will become very clear, very fast, why someone doesn't want to be involved in this community.

Speaker 02 24:09

Well, and, you know, it's not just for women either, right? Because, you know... Exactly. There are many people that are on dating apps that need to verify for safety, that, you know, would really like to fall in love.

Speaker 01 24:21

We're committing frauds out there too.

Speaker 02 24:23

Exactly. It's like, you know, everybody's... human. And, you know, we all want to be part of this community that is actually verified and saying who we are and actually being real human beings instead of trying to be shady and slide under everybody's radar.

Speaker 00 24:40

Exactly, and that's why Fuzzy is super inclusive, right? We understand that everybody can be frauded, and Fuzzy is to keep everybody safe, including LGBTQ and communities where maybe they're a little bit more subject to being taken advantage of. We want to make sure that they have the the tool that they need and in that regard no matter how or where somebody is on their economic stature you deserve to be safe and what i mean by that is we're coming out with the freemium version because no matter how much money you have you deserve to be in a safe position and we want to make sure that we can provide safety to everybody

Speaker 02 25:16

well and that's incredibly valuable in terms of the dating world but the business world as well you know companies like your your father's company being able to verify people without having to go through the expensive and time-consuming digging through public records and all of this stuff, hiring someone to do all that can be really, really valuable. Well, I want to thank both of you for joining me in this panel, and I know that you had one other thing you wanted to say.

Speaker 00 25:39

Yes, and to that vein, I just want to say, if anybody is out here thinking, wow, I could never do that, or this isn't for me, I'm really nervous, you were me 18 months ago. The fact that I'm sitting up here right now is a testament to the fact that if you believe in your and you have a lot of passion behind what you believe you want to get out there in the world, do it. I mean, Nike literally has a saying, let's do it. And to that regard, none of this. Me sitting up here included could have happened without this girl right here. She has believed in me. She's believed in what Fuzzy can do for everybody in terms of safety and just creating a better online, safer world. And I knew Qualified Digital was the right partner. I've seen the output into That's all for this

Speaker 02 26:40

episode. Thanks so much for joining us. And I hope you found this conversation as insightful as I did. This podcast is produced by Inc. Custom Studio in partnership with Fuzzy and Qualified Digital. I'm Abigail Bassett. And our producer is Avery Miles. Our editor is Nicholas Torres.