VIEWAPP CEO Alexander Fokin On Fraud-Proofing Digital Inspections

Roberto Popolizio
Updated on: July 17, 2024

Whatever you know about cybersecurity, cybercriminals probably know that too and are already finding new ways to breach your defenses and steal your sensitive data.

How can you always stay on top of the latest threats, vulnerabilities, and emerging trends to effectively protect yourself or your business as cyber threats grow in number and sophistication?

In this new interview series by Safety Detectives, I am talking to cybersecurity experts and business leaders who share untapped insights from their experience and expertise that will help you be more aware and effective in protecting your sensitive data.

Our guest today is Alexander Fokin, CEO and founder of VIEWAPP, a digital inspection technology implemented through a smartphone app that allows users to perform remote inspections themselves. The idea behind VIEWAPP came out of Alexander’s 18-years experience collaborating with various insurers and as founder of an insurance broker startup, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023.

To start, can you share the story of what inspired you to pursue your professional path?

VIEWAPP developed an innovative fraud-proof digital inspection technology. Your information resource has an exclusive focus specifically on safety, and for us, anti-fraud is a key objective and advantage of our platform.

We started 21 years ago as an insurance agency and have worked with many insurance companies. In the process of interaction, we discovered difficulties and obstacles that prevent insurers from doing business and developing in one of their core processes conducting inspections.

And we didn’t miss this win-win chance to help insurance companies and establish VIEWAPP as the standard for fraud-proof digital inspections .

We didn’t just focus only on insurance companies, as different businesses need secure digital inspections: banks for inspecting mortgaged property, leasing companies for monitoring leased property, construction monitoring companies. There are many cases where VIEWAPP can be used.

What are all the pain points you solve and for whom? Explain it in simple terms.

VIEWAPP digital inspections:

• Minimizes cost of inspection process up to70%
• Provides antifraud protection with comprehensive security measures
• Ensures that inspections are carried out accurately according to the inspection company’s regulations
• Simplifies the process of routine work of experts with the results of inspections
• Automates filling in the final documentation with data from the inspection and provide digital signature of the document

What was a pivotal moment in your life/career that shaped your views on cybersecurity and privacy?

In close co-operation with insurance companies, it has become evident that they are constantly and on a large scale confronted with fraud, especially in the results of inspections.

Fraudsters manipulate the results of pre-insurance inspections or the results of inspections during claims settlement if there is no defence technology in existence. And companies suffer serious losses, with some fraud going undiscovered and some fraud that does get detected incurring investigative costs, which means they also suffer losses.

Fraud affects both companies and their clients, because it affects the loss statistics, making insurance policies more expensive. That is why we have made security a key objective of our digital inspection platform.

Now, the problem of fake content has become even more critical with the advent and rapid development of artificial intelligence, and a serious cross-checking system is required to detect manipulation of inspection results, which is what we have implemented in VIEWAPP

What are the most overlooked cybersecurity and online privacy threats that you see affecting end users? Why are these threats particularly concerning?

The VIEWAPP digital inspection platform is a SaaS b2b solution. Therefore, in our case, it is about protecting the security of COMPANIES that are exposed to fraudulent attacks.

These attacks are aimed at spoofing the results of inspections in order to gain profit. A simple little example to illustrate the size of the damage from fraudsters is insurance acceptance fraud, replacing a broken SUV with a similar whole car. We all know how much an SUV costs, so even one such fraud will cost the insurance company a lot of money. Without VIEWAPP, this could have been realised either by collusion with the inspector or by tampering with the materials during a self inspection.

With VIEWAPP there is no such thing as fraud. We have various security measures in place, such as checksum reconciliation, geo-coordinate checks and much more. At the same time, we can combine various security tools depending on the individual characteristics of the company, e.g. we can compare the planned inspection map with the actual map with specific tracking.

VIEWAPP’s multi-stage anti-fraud protection works against the spoofing of photos, videos and GPS coordinates and it’s one of the key features of the VIEWAPP platform. It ensures the safety and reliability of the data obtained from the inspections. It prevents possible manipulation or tampering of location information, photos and videos.

Our method of storing photo and video information is NOT through a smartphone gallery, but a separate secure storage in the app itself. Various methods and tools are used to create secure digital inspections:

• User identification at the authorisation step;
• SSL certificate that provides data encryption;
• Geolocation of the device, which gives the opportunity to compare information with graphical data;
• Use of smartphone sensors such as compass, accelerometer, motion sensor;
• Material storage with checksum calculation and matching;
• Video steps that make data spoofing impossible.

Multi-stage protection allows to check the authenticity of materials from several positions at once, for example, motion sensor captures events during inspection when moving from one step to another, when switching on the camera or raising your hand to take a picture of the car roof, and GPS sensor readings can be easily compared with data from Google panorama. For all materials, the application and server calculate checksums if an attempt is made to replace materials, these sums will not match and the attempted fraud will become obvious.

What are some things that people should START doing today that they’re currently not doing to protect their information?

In our case, our end users are COMPANIES that carry out regular and large-scale inspections (insurance, banking, leasing and other organisations). And now they are in a transitional stage, when decisions are being made to switch to digital inspections, i.e. not all companies are already using digital inspections with built-in security.

From our point of view, the transition to secure digital inspections that will allow companies not only to prevent fraud and reduce the risk of loss of profit, but also to gain a host of other benefits:

• Reduction in inspection costs by up to 70%
• Timely transition to digital inspection technology
• Compliance with inspection regulations (saves resources)
• Improved service quality: Fast and accurate inspections with VIEWAPP increase customer satisfaction, which in turn improves the company’s reputation
• Faster transactions: Quick and safe inspections speed up transactions. And this leads to increased sales volume and profit level
• Improved competitiveness and increased client portfolio
• A uniform standard of any inspection guarantees order and clear work of all specialists involved in this process

In your opinion, have tools and technologies improved enough to help end users secure their online privacy effectively? What improvements can be done in this area?

The fact is that we see in practice every day that fraudsters are not going to stop and show more and more ingenuity, so the process of protecting inspection materials should not stop either.

VIEWAPP digital inspections should be done directly at the site exactly so that the inspector cannot download other photos and videos to avoid tampering and manipulation. To avoid this protection measure, for example, people try to take photos on a tablet with a smartphone. We see this and stop it immediately.

And let’s not forget about the ease with which photos and videos can be manipulated by artificial intelligence. This requires daily monitoring and development of new security measures, which is what we are engaged in. In our case, since we don’t allow photos and videos to be uploaded from the smartphone’s gallery, this prevents the data from being tampered with in any way, including by AI.

What are some of the most creative or sophisticated online scams you’ve encountered in your career? How do you advise to prevent them?

Situations that we often observe are fake coordinates of inspections and substituted photos and videos designed to mislead companies for whom monitoring of objects (e.g. special equipment in remote areas) is important. That is, when an unprotected inspection is conducted, the coordinates are faked, but the object is no longer present. VIEWAPP prevents such scams and saves companies from such losses.