Known Faces report

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This page is a technical overview of the Known Faces report.

You'll find API documentation separately.

Introduction

The Known Faces report compares a specific applicant’s likeness in their most recent live photo or live video to live photos and live videos with the previous applicants in your Onfido account database. It alerts you to faces which have already been through your identity verification flow, so you can catch repeat identity fraud attempts, and help confused users who may have forgotten they already registered with you to recover their accounts.

Known Faces will only return matches against applicants that are NOT the applicant that the report is being run on. In other words, live photos and live videos associated with an applicant ID will not be compared with each other.

Each applicant you run a Known Faces report against must have an uploaded live photo or live video, taken at time of check submission. In API terms, this means that the applicant object needs to contain a live photo or live video for a Known Faces report to run successfully. If no live photo or live video is found, the Known Faces report will be automatically withdrawn and return an error in the report properties (see the API reference documentation for API v2 or v3).

You can run Known Faces as a standalone report, but we recommend that you combine it with a Document and Facial Similarity report in the same check.

Known Faces as a standalone report

You can run Known Faces as a standalone report, but we recommend that you combine it with a Document and Facial Similarity report in the same check. This will guarantee that the live photo or live video to be searched is real (i.e. not a spoof), as this is assessed as part of the Facial Similarity report.

As a standalone report, Known Faces will not make an assessment of whether the face on the live photo or live video is real and not a spoof (e.g. photos of photos, photos of screens): it is only concerned with the matching of faces, regardless of whether they are real faces or not.

Known Faces and deleted applicants

No matches will be returned against any permanently deleted applicants. If you delete an individual's applicant object, then that individual goes through the identity verification flow again and then you run a Known Faces report against them, this will not return any matches. This is because no data would be available to match against. Read more about deleting applicants in our API documentation.

What to do with matches

Ideally, you should review all matches from Known Faces in-house, to make sure you do not reject genuine users who were incorrectly flagged.

We recommend that you build some logic to compare the name and date of birth of matches to the original applicants.

This will help you to determine if matches are the same person who forgot their account credentials and are signing up again, or a fraudster.

Retries with Known Faces

If retries are done within the same applicant object (recommended)

In this case, Known Faces reports will work without any special configuration.

If every user retry is done in a new applicant object (not recommended)

In this case: when you receive a match from Known Faces, we recommend that you check in your own database whether the applicant ID in the match corresponds to the same unique user, and ignore those matches.