The Importance of Age Verification Online: Protecting Children and Upholding Compliance

Today's increased rates of online shopping and faster deliveries demand safe age verification processes. We’re way past it being enough to check the “I’m 18 years old”-box to ensure that whoever is making a purchase isn’t a minor. By using a secure age verification service, you as a business can help make online shopping safer and prevent fraud.

The Legal and Regulatory Landscape of Age Verification

Not only does age verification protect minors from buying restricted products online, but it also helps your business make sure you follow laws and fulfil regulatory obligations. This is very important as today's regulatory authorities tend to legally expect age-restricted products and service providers to know their consumers' age – both when it comes to in-store and online sales.

Today governments are trying to fight minors getting into addiction, debt and dangerous situations by requiring certain businesses to use age verification services online. These are companies within the tobacco, cannabis and alcohol industry, dating, pornography and gambling websites, and those selling e-cigarettes and vaping kits.

By making sure that your business is taking age restrictions seriously, you in turn also protect your brand reputation and showcase social responsibility. Exposure to platforms that promote underage activity, such as mentioned above, can be damaging for minors. It’s therefore important to make sure that you as a company take a moral stand on the safety of minors. A quick and easy way to do this is by using age verification online. In not doing this, your brand will risk getting hurt alongside the minors.

A well-implemented KYC process is key in making your business and products safe for customers to purchase online, as KYC and age verification go hand in hand – both aiming to verify and authorise users.

How Age Verification Helps Prevent Fraudulent Activity Online

Two important factors of any secure age verification process are fraud prevention and liveness detection. By taking these two factors into consideration when developing software that verifies age, the risk for spoofing activities is reduced.

Today’s age verification software determines the online consumer’s age by accessing and referencing public databases. Meaning that the software compares the ID used for an online purchase with IDs from these databases and which by doing so, helps prevent fraud.

Another way to prevent fraud, which most software use, are features that checks if there’s an actual person by the phone, computer or tablet. They do so by requiring the buyer to take a selfie or video of themselves as a way to verify their face and ID. Once this is done, the online purchase is authorized.

Software requiring a selfie and video for identification creates a kind of real-time fraud intelligence which makes it more difficult for kids and teenagers to try and fool the system. With age verification in place, stealing the ID of parents, borrowing one from older siblings and friends, or even faking an ID, is no more, as verifying age online has never been easier or safer.

We can digitise and automate your age verification

Contact us today at sales@zignsec.com or book a demo to learn more about how you can protect yourself, your business, and your customers with a digitized and robust age verification solution.