Catch Me If You Can, Rewritten for the AI Era

Yardstik is building trust infrastructure for the modern workforce. This piece explores why the rise of AI driven fraud, synthetic identities, and ongoing compliance risk is making continuous workforce trust and monitoring more important than ever.

 

When we first wrote about our investment in Yardstik in 2023, we believed trust in the modern workforce was becoming harder to establish and more important to maintain. That view has only strengthened. In fact, the market has moved even faster in Yardstik’s direction. What once looked like a better way to run background checks now looks increasingly like critical infrastructure for a workforce environment shaped by fraud, deception, and constant change.

MissionOG invests in companies that solve real operational pain in markets that are becoming more important, not less. We like businesses that sit inside critical workflows, earn the right to expand, and evolve as the problem itself evolves. Yardstik fits that pattern. The company started with modern screening, but smartly has broadened its platform around a much larger and more urgent question: how do employers establish and maintain trust in a world where deception is getting cheaper, easier, and more scalable?

The scale of the problem is no longer abstract. The FTC reported that consumers lost more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, up 25% year over year. It also said job and employment agency scam losses rose from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024, while identity theft reports topped 1.1 million last year. The FBI separately reported more than $16 billion in internet crime losses in 2024, up 33% from the prior year. Those are broad market figures, but they point to the same conclusion: the fraud economy is growing, and every workflow built on trust is under more pressure than it was just a few years ago.

That matters enormously in hiring and workforce management.

If Catch Me If You Can were set in today’s environment, Frank Abagnale would not need to rely only on forged paper and in person impersonation. He would have access to synthetic identities, AI generated content, altered documents, cloned voices, and digital personas that look increasingly real. That is not a dramatic projection. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake, and its survey work found that 6% of candidates admitted to interview fraud. FinCEN has already warned that financial institutions are seeing increased suspicious activity involving deepfake media used to alter or create fraudulent identity documents and bypass verification methods.

The problem will only accelerate with advancement in AI capabilities.

AI lowers the cost of deception while improving its quality. It helps bad actors produce more believable identities, more polished records, and more convincing interactions at greater scale. Microsoft recently noted that threat actors are using AI to support identity fabrication, social engineering, and long term misuse of legitimate access at low cost. AI is not simply making good systems more efficient, it is also making bad actors more capable. That changes the threat model for every employer – for all need to know who is entering their workforce, whether candidate credentials are real, and whether trust still holds after onboarding.

That is where Yardstik’s evolution has been especially compelling.

The company did not remain confined to a point in time screening workflow. It expanded toward continuous monitoring and broader trust infrastructure. Today, Yardstik is a Human Trust Platform, combining identity fraud prevention, candidate screening, credential verification, and continuous monitoring across the worker lifecycle. Its product set now includes tools such as identity re-verification, license re-verification, continuous criminal checks, social media re-screening, MVR re-checks, and AI detection. That matters because trust is no longer something employers can establish once and assume forever. It has to be continuously measured and maintained.

Legacy screening providers were largely built for a world where the question was whether someone cleared a check at a single moment in time. But employers now operate in a more distributed, fluid, and digitally mediated workforce. They are managing employees, contractors, gig workers, and specialized labor pools across multiple systems and geographies. In that world, trust is not just a hiring issue. It is a compliance issue, a safety issue, a brand issue, and an operating issue. When trust breaks, the cost extends far beyond the original screening event.

That is why the Catch Me If You Can reference feels so relevant. The lesson of that story was not just that one clever person could deceive a system. It was that systems built on outdated assumptions remain vulnerable far too long. The answer is not more manual review layered onto old workflows. It is better tooling, better signal, and better infrastructure designed for a world where deception is supercharged and dynamic.

That is the backdrop against which we view Yardstik today.

We continue to believe the company is building in the right category, against the right problem, with the right product trajectory. What started as a better approach to background checks is becoming something much more important: trust infrastructure for the modern workforce. That is what makes Yardstik so compelling. The problem has gotten harder. The need has become more urgent. And the company has continued to evolve in a way that matches the moment.