Veda Advantage Reveals Nearly A Quarter Of A Million Nzers Use An Alias

5 December 2010, Auckland: Increasing numbers of New Zealanders are using more than one name and the country’s leading credit bureau has found a stark correlation between people using aliases and those that default on their bills or are insolvent.

Veda Advantage Managing Director John Roberts says the alias information held by the company is highly valued by customers as it matches people with their aliases and is a strong indicator for credit providers to dig deeper into a client’s history before advancing credit.

“The Veda Advantage alias information is an increasingly valuable reference for creditors – a person who has an alias has a one in two chance of defaulting on monies owed.”

Almost seven percent of individuals listed on the Veda Advantage bureau have one or more aliases. That’s a total of 241,915. In all, they have 428,000 aliases between them.

The company’s data also shows more than 50 percent of people with an alias also have a default on their file and 10 percent of all defaults relating to a single person have an alias on file.

Mr Roberts says Veda’s powerful matching tools can uncover the use of aliases, identify connections between names and establish the number of aliases in use. The company has identified one person with 36 aliases. There are 1973 individuals with more than five aliases and 127 individuals with more than 10 aliases.

The data comes from a range of sources with 1,000 aliases added each month.

Managing Director John Roberts says “over the past two years the number of aliases identified by Veda has grown by 30 percent showing not only increasing awareness of the use of aliases but a reflection of greater identity fraud in our community. “

Women out number men when it comes to using aliases and a staggering 32 percent of all insolvents who use alternative names are women. This can in large part be explained by name changes associated with marriage or divorce.

However while there are legitimate reasons to have or use more than one name, such as marriage or attempts to make pronunciation or spelling easier, fraud is the only explanation for the rapid growth in the use of aliases amongst New Zealanders.

ENDS

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