Product: ImageSECURE
Company: International Security Products Inc./ ProDocumentSolutions

With the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act taking effect Oct. 28, 2004, we've now entered the age of check truncation, which means check images and lots of them. An important question for financial institutions and all entities dealing with electronic images of checks is how to protect themselves from fraud?

International Security Products Inc. (ISP) is a company that specializes in the development, production and marketing of technologies that are related to anti-fraud security solutions.

The company's mission is "to engineer effective security methodologies to protect original content from replications, forgery and counterfeiting."

International Security Products (ISP) is a company that specializes in solutions to prevent document fraud problems. Its latest product, offered through its sister company, ProDocumentSolutions, is called ImageSECURE.

ImageSECURE enables the verification of the authenticity of printed checks after they've been scanned and digitized by a bank or other financial institution.

ISP said that check fraud prevention works in a similar manner to protecting your computer against a virus: You create layers of security features. ImageSECURE has six security layers, and the company said it's virtually impossible to replicate its images digitally without detection.

Here's how it works: At one level, ImageSECURE involves the printing of microstructures. Then, using a patent-pending technology, the product embeds a secondary verifier into the background of these microstructures, all of which are printed behind the common areas of payee amount and signature fields. This digital alphanumeric verifier can create a nearly limitless amount of custom patterns. When these are scanned and compressed into a low-resolution bitmap image, they form pixel-latent verification identifiers.

These embedded or hidden images survive scanning and compression to become part of the digital check.

The images can be verified visually or using a software application.

"The image-survivable security technology of ImageSECURE allows an inspector to determine whether a low-resolution bitmap was created by the original document or a counterfeit, long after the original has been destroyed," said George Phillips, Chief Executive Officer.

"It works in concert with our other security measures to enable a bank to identify a counterfeit check at any point in the process cycle. From the point of presentment all the way down to the digital copy, this security technology can dramatically reduce a bank's, and/or corporate customer's, liability against fraudulent checks."

Some of the features and benefits of the technology are: It verifies authenticity at the point of presentment without any secondary devices; survives a low resolution image scan and verifies that the digital conversion was from the original source; does not require further equipment to verify; and works as an effective deterrent for preventing counterfeiting.

International Security Products Inc./ ProDocumentSolutions
1750 Commerce Way
Paso Robles, CA 93446
800-726-0080
www.prodocumentsolutions.com