Why Prove Matters When Identity Data Leaks Become Critical Infrastructure Failures

Large-scale identity leaks do not just create “breach news.” They change the economics of fraud. Once names, emails, and phone numbers are broadly available, they become plug-and-play ingredients for takeover attempts, targeted phishing, synthetic identity assembly, and the usual “reset the account via the phone” playbooks.

If you run digital identity or KYC, that should feel uncomfortably familiar. Most programs still rely on fragile, OTP-centric flows and static attributes…data that attackers can intercept, replay, or socially engineer. Data that is used to make AI agents that can open or takeover accounts at massive scale. Often, this identity information has already been compromised hundreds of times over. The problem is simple: you cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. Once those attributes leak, attackers get unlimited reps.

Prove matters because it shifts the trust foundation away from copyable data and toward verifiable custody. Prove helps you answer two simple questions as one:

• Is the real customer actually here right now?
• Are the details they’re using (phone, device, account) really theirs to use?

Why traditional identity collapses at scale

Most identity stacks still behave like identity is an attribute bundle you can keep validating forever. You ask for data at enrollment. You ask for it again during recovery. You authenticate with mechanisms that are easy to intercept or socially engineer. Then you try to compensate with risk scoring and "does this look normal?" logic.

That setup can work when the threat is occasional and human-paced. It starts failing when the adversary is automated, persistent, and armed with real data from real breaches. They test your flows, find the least-defended paths (recovery is a favorite), and scale. On top of that, humans can only spot deepfakes correctly about 40% of the time (per Prove's 2026 State of Identity Report), so "looks legit" is not a stable foundation.

That matters because fraud is not mainly about wrong data anymore. It's about stolen correct data and scale. This is where a lot of document-first and KYC stacks get squeezed and gaps between solutions get exploited. A fraudster or AI agent can type accurate stolen PII all day long, but they still hit a wall if they cannot prove they're in possession of the real, cryptographically authenticated phone and the real device behind it. Hardware cryptographic validation does not have that same weakness. It is not judging a picture. It is validating custody. Anchoring the entire identity process to cryptographically managed keys changes the game.

But cryptographic custody only works if you can maintain it across real-world transitions. Once you start treating the phone like a key, you create a new challenge: key management. Good customers upgrade phones, port numbers, switch carriers, travel, and have activity histories. As an added complexity, carriers recycle numbers in ways that result in a number that keeps a history that looks legitimate—but the person holding it may be completely different. If your KYC or recovery flow only verifies possession without validating current ownership (or worse treats phone tenure as a static trust signal) you risk handing fraudsters a convincing identity built on recycled numbers, reassigned credentials, and borrowed legitimacy that your controls were never designed to detect.

Prove is built to handle those messy transitions without punishing real customers. We track ownership continuity across carrier events, disconnects, and reassignments with years of proprietary signals that have monitored history. We then maintain a persistent, cryptographically anchored identity that adapts as customers upgrade devices, port numbers, switch carriers, and move through the natural evolution of their relationship with their phone. Finally, our logic enforces assurance by continuously evaluating whether a phone represents legitimate, current ownership or borrowed trust. Together, these capabilities create a system that maintains continuity when changes are legitimate and degrades trust fast when they're not, which ensures continuity when you want it, and a hard stop when you need it.

Identity built for continuous assurance

If digital identity is becoming critical infrastructure, the question is not, “Can we verify someone once?,” It is, “Can we maintain trustworthy access over time, under adversarial pressure, even when the underlying data is already public?”

Prove is built for the latter. It is anchored in custody, not copyable attributes. This is a persistent, managed, and connected identity layer that doesn't just verify at a point in time; it maintains custody and context across the entire customer lifecycle, continuously monitoring for changes, risks, and anomalies while leveraging the trust built through tenure and device history.