← From the Ground Up
From the Ground Up
The $75 Billion Deception Economy and the Female Founders Finding the Solution
00:28:51
Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:02]
Kailey Nietzsche
Qualified Digital is the premier full service customer journey experience agency. To find out how we can help your digital B2B and B2C offerings shine brighter, contact us at qualifieddigital.com QD powers the fuzzy app, which verifies online profiles in seconds. Your digital gut check for safer real life connections. Find it in the App store or@fuzzyverify.com.
- [00:26]
Jackie Saleem
Foreign.
- [00:31]
Abigail Bassett
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 they are with a few simple clicks. During the south by Southwest conference in Austin, I sat down with the two female founders and developers of the app, Kailey Nietzsche, the founder and CEO of Fuzzy, and Jackie Saleem, the founder and CEO of Qualified Digital, Fuzzy's agency partner. Together, these two women use the power of collaboration to create new technology that tackles this global issue. And we dug a bit deeper on how their brand could empower everyone to stay safer, both online and in person.
- [01:31]
Kailey Nietzsche
Kayleigh, I want to start with you. Let's talk about what is Fuzzy and how did this whole idea start?
- [01:38]
Sure. Well, first off, 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 okay. 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 technology perspective, but also from an advisory perspective. And Jackie Salim with Qualified Digital is my number one choice.
- [03:25]
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 why does that persist? And what makes Fuzzy different from sort of that very doom and gloom, kind of like you're stalking someone online?
- [03:55]
Jackie Saleem
Great question. I mean, one of the first things that I said when Kaylee 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, like, 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, like, be a fake, or 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.
- [05:41]
Kailey Nietzsche
And Kaylee, just walk me through how the app works. Like, once this launches, what does it look like? How does this work? How am I. 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?
- [05:55]
Yeah. So this is going to be a joint question because I'm not the very 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 kid's 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.
- [06:50]
Jackie Saleem
Thank you, Kaylee. I hang on. 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 this 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 Kayleigh talked about in the beginning. Lied about professional, lied about degrees, you know, lied in every single possible way and bring it to the end user.
- [08:00]
Kailey Nietzsche
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 displayed, etc. 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 what makes us truly remarkable, we're really about transparency. We're going to 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.
- [08:46]
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. That's really sort of hiding the ball, if you will.
- [09:08]
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, fuzzies 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 wanted 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 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.
- [10:47]
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 sounds very like 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?
- [11:05]
Jackie Saleem
Yeah, you're much better at speaking into the microphone than I am.
- [11:10]
Kailey Nietzsche
Thank you.
- [11:12]
Jackie Saleem
You're welcome. One of the things that people actually bring up a lot is AI perpetuating the problem. And it is, but I think it's much 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, 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.
- [12:12]
Kailey Nietzsche
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.
- [12:24]
Jackie Saleem
Also, if you saw the number of selfies that went over was very impressive.
- [12:29]
Kailey Nietzsche
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 like 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, you know, potentially dangerous for anybody on the app?
- [12:53]
Jackie Saleem
Absolutely. And really like it's going to look also and see are you also posting selfies back or is that person just, you know, 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 like a sexy face is definitely a marker. One of them.
- [13:24]
Kailey Nietzsche
One of 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.
- [13:38]
Jackie Saleem
There are 8 out of 10.
- [13:40]
Kailey Nietzsche
Right. The possibility of a narcissist is very high. Yeah. Sorry, Kaylee, you were going to say something?
- [13:46]
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 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.
- [14:35]
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.
- [14:51]
Jackie Saleem
But before it was, it's not Twitter anymore.
- [14:54]
Kailey Nietzsche
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. Given how constantly online and connected we all are?
- [15:16]
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. You know, 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 you know, 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.
- [16:17]
Jackie Saleem
I would also just add it's really hard. I mean it's a lot of work and it's super 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 like tie together systems, QA IT and ensure that all this data can come together and give that real time profile of someone.
- [16:48]
Kailey Nietzsche
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, 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 sort of enabled this to be possible?
- [17:04]
Jackie Saleem
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.
- [17:27]
Kailey Nietzsche
And how do you determine sort of what's valuable to a fuzzy user versus what's not? Because there is so much data on the Internet, right? Like if you just put somebody's name or name, age and location into a search engine, it's likely to throw up a lot of stuff.
- [17:41]
Jackie Saleem
Yeah, we looked at that in two parts. One was, you know, first of all, there's a lot of information that we can get back that makes sense, someone unsafe. So we weren't going to post that up there. But also lucky for us, not so lucky for us, but we had kind of a patient Zero story with, we.
- [17:59]
Kailey Nietzsche
Call him the Wuhan bat. So that's what we'll refer to him as moving forward.
- [18:05]
I feel like there's a story there.
- [18:08]
Jackie Saleem
I've never used that, but yeah, but we actually had that. And really our goal is to, 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 target. So putting things out like address and phone number is something we've stayed away from, even though it's really accessible.
- [18:35]
Kailey Nietzsche
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.
- [18:58]
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 fourth of July barbecue we had, and I introduced him to my beautiful 6 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 a marriage license? And then I realized, well, technology has advanced so far. I'm sure we could. 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. Like, 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.
- [20:45]
Go ahead. I was gonna say, you know, when you. When what happened to you, happened to you, you went to a Facebook page to discover all this, right?
- [20:55]
I did, yes.
- [20:56]
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?
- [21:03]
Jackie Saleem
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 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 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.
- [22:17]
Kailey Nietzsche
So it's kind of like an authenticator for who you are, essentially.
- [22:20]
Jackie Saleem
Yeah. And as Kaylee was talking about all these different other use cases, if somebody's coming in to fix your sync, you can ask them just to show their own verified profile. Right.
- [22:32]
Kailey Nietzsche
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 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.
- [23:47]
Jackie Saleem
And guess what? They're not verifying themselves.
- [23:50]
Kailey Nietzsche
I would imagine no criminal is going to be like, oh, guess what? I'm going to verify myself and say that I'm actually this person.
- [23:55]
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 gonna 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 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.
- [24:35]
Well, and, you know, it's not just for women either. Right. Because, you know.
- [24:39]
Jackie Saleem
Exactly.
- [24:40]
Kailey Nietzsche
There are many people that wanted that are on dating apps that need to verify for safety that, you know, would really like to fall in love.
- [24:48]
Jackie Saleem
We're committing frauds out there, too.
- [24:50]
Kailey Nietzsche
Exactly. It's like, you know, everybody's. We're all human and, you know, we all want to be part of this community that is actually, like, verified and saying who we are and actually, like, being real human beings instead of sort of trying to be shady and slide under everybody's radar.
- [25:07]
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 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 a 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.
- [25:43]
Well, and that's incredibly valuable in terms of the dating world, but the business world as well. You know, companies like 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 the 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.
- [26:06]
Yes into 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 yourself and you have a lot of passion behind what you believe to, 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, 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 this, 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 and delivery that they've done before. It's truly a work. My team is amazing. I thank everybody that I work with on the Fuzzy team. I just so grateful. So thank you so much for having me.
- [27:04]
Thank you guys.
- [27:06]
Abigail Bassett
That's all for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us and I hope you found this conversation as always, insightful as I did. This podcast is produced by Ink Custom Studio in partnership with Fuzzy and Qualified Digital. I'm Abigail Bassett and our producer is Avery Miles. Our editor is Nicholas Torres.
- [27:35]
Kailey Nietzsche
Panoply.