What does Cifas-adjacent mortgage fraud screening cover?

Cifas runs the National Fraud Database: fraud cases shared by its members (banks, lenders, insurers, telecoms and others), which members search when they receive a new application and add to when they confirm a fraud.

"Cifas-adjacent" screening means checking for the same patterns when you aren't a member. For mortgage fraud they include:

1. Known fraudsters: people already confirmed to have made a fraudulent application.
2. Applicant markers: an address history that doesn't fit, an identity that has changed recently, income or deposits that don't add up.
3. Property addresses previously involved in fraud (overvaluation, a false seller, a company used to launder money).
4. Synthetic identities built from real and invented details, the hardest to catch without a shared database.

Only Cifas members can search Cifas itself. Without it, a lender or broker can still cover the obvious routes: check the broker or introducer on the FCA register (and its Warning List for clones), screen the people against the sanctions lists and for PEP, and trace a company seller or buyer to the people behind it. Stratum's checks for financial services firms do those in one run.